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I run pretty much every day, and I run at pretty much the same pace—about 11 minutes per mile. And I usually run between 1-2 miles a day. I never really get much faster or slower than that. And I do it almost every day. So I know my lungs pretty well.
Well, that was in Connecticut. I traveled to Denver this week and jumped on the treadmill going at an 11-minute mile pace. Whoo boy, that didn’t last long. I forgot that Connecticut is about 200 feet above sea level, and Denver is right around 5,280 feet above sea level—literally a mile up in the sky.
I felt the difference. But here’s the thing: It took a little while to hit me, and it kind of snuck up on me. I didn’t immediately feel like I was running with a bag of bricks on my back, and I wasn’t huffing and puffing after 30 seconds. It was more like I ran at my normal pace, and when I looked at the clock to see how long I had been running, I expected it to say 5 or 6 minutes… and it said 2 minutes. That’s when I remembered the altitude.
I’m writing about that here because I just had my toughest month of sobriety, with some sad stuff and some bad stuff all crashing down on me and my family. But I didn’t even hesitate, I went to more meetings and made phone calls because I know my sobriety can be in jeopardy in a hurry. If I had to guess, I probably got to 27 meetings in the 30 days of June. I wanted to be on the safe side and make sure my gas tank was built up.
As I was running and feeling heavier and heavier without really realizing it right away, it reminded me that now that I am through June and some difficult things are more in the rearview mirror—sort of—I gotta keep my foot on the pedal. Because the more I think about it, the more I realize that the true danger zones for my addiction to sneak up are NOT usually really scary or sad moments. They’re when I am really busy at work, or I go on vacation with my family and I have to look up meetings to find one, or we’re moving over the course of a few days. It’s those moments when I am feeling good, a little busier, a little relaxed and resting on my laurels, that I can really get screwy.
To make the exact connection to that Denver run, it’s the idea that I think I am cruising along at the same pace but the truth is, life is just a tad heavier than I realize and it’s bogging me down.
So for that run, I decided to try to get to a mile, and it took me more like 13 minutes than 11, and the entire time, I kept thinking about how sometimes the answer is that when I am too busy to get to a meeting… I need to get to two meetings. And I usually can. The “too busy” thing, in my experience, is a bunch of b******t. I’ve never had a time when the truth of the situation was that I couldn’t possibly find a meeting online or in person.
As I wrote this, I started cycling through people that I know who have relapsed, and what they said when they came back. And I gotta say, almost 100 percent of them said some version of “I slowed down or stopped going to meetings, and boom, suddenly my disease snuck up on me.” I can’t recall too many people saying, “I was going to lots of meetings but I had a bad day at work, and my disease walked up to me and punched me in the face and I found myself drunk.”
So the lesson is, be alert when you think you don’t need to be alert. And also, don’t run in Denver.
This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:
Back in the old wild west, a man was riding from Monterey to Salinas when he encountered a drunk lying in the road. The guy had an empty whiskey bottle beside him and his ear to the ground.
“What is it?” asked the traveler.
“Fifteen wagons, sixty horses, seventeen women, twenty-four men, five dogs, and a donkey,” replied the drunk.
“That’s incredible!” exclaimed the rancher. “You know all that just by listening to the ground?”
“No,” replied the drunk. “They ran over me about an hour ago.”
(Credit: AA Grapevine, November 2002, Ron L. from El Cajon, California)
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