At the beginning of this summer, a roommate of mine, knowing that I had formerly been a runner in high school and sporadically during college, convinced me to register for the Nike+ HumanRace, taking place on Randall’s Island. Seeing as how I’d spent the past three weeks drinking wine, feeling sorry for myself, and acting like an imbecile along the Seine in Paris, I figured this was as good a reason as any for getting back into shape.

Training went as well as could be expected for someone in my condition. After purchasing a new pair of training shoes and reviving my gym shorts from their three-year hibernation amongst the mold and rot of the back of my dresser, I began running and lifting weights every other day. Admittedly, it took a while to convince the lifeforms growing along all my elastic waistbands and sleeveless t-shirts, but soon enough, I’d begun to quell both them and the screaming leg muscles I hadn’t used in over two years.

The hardest change was actually that of my diet.

It soon became apparent that, living in New York City, I was ingesting far too many meats and preservatives. Last summer, I (sort of) lived with a person who was a vegetarian. It occurred to me that, during those three months, I felt the healthiest I had ever felt: I was skating or biking every day, working at a country club (which meant carrying golf bags around), and eating almost no meat.

And so it began. The first in a series of diet changes. I started up with a bang, grilling onions, red peppers, and yellow squash, and served it to myself on a roll of French bread that had a mayo, lemon juice, and garlic mixture along with feta cheese melted to its insides. While delicious and providing for the next six meals (I’d failed to recognize the recipe was for a full commune of veggie-loving hippies), these sandwiches and their resultant eating habit didn’t rid my body of the daily fatigue in the backs of my calves, thighs, and especially my stomach.

I remembered what it was like as a runner in high school and I’d never hurt quite so much at the beginning of workouts. Sure, the pain always subsided by the end, but this was a disconcerting pain, as if my stomach was always trying to expel something that I’d put into it.

Since it wasn’t the meat and preserved, saturated fat-ridden foods, I moved on to my next bad habit: coffee.

My mother’s professional child-rearing skills had, at the tender age of ONLY FOUR YEARS, inspired her to allow me to drink coffee. Mind you, this was only tiny sips of milk-and-sugar’d java, but it was coffee, nonetheless. There I perched, pleasantly singing along to Sesame Street, atop my mother’s knee: “C is for COFFEE, it’s good enough for me! C is for CAFFEINE, it’s good enough for me!”

This habit got particularly bad during college when I began working at a café and truly began requiring that black liquid to maintain my lifestyle. This, as anyone who has made their way through a Big Ten University will tell you, is entirely dependent on your ability to mentally perform at your peak only four hours after you do a forty-second keg stand, slam four kamikaze shooters, and stay out playing a Mortal Kombat arcade machine until 3 a.m. My 7 o’clock shift wasn’t ever a problem, nor were midterms, so long as I got there early enough to stick my mouth under the espresso machine as it percolated its first in a long day of dripping.

The habit had followed me 800 miles across the country and, noticing that my stomach had grown accustomed to the normal aching and debilitating diarrhea that most people experience when reaching my particular level of java intake, I decided that this might be an unhealthy amount when one is training for a race. I’m not stupid though, I know a COMPLETE chemical dependency when I see one. My normal intake consisted of:

1.5 cups as I got out of bed. This was required every morning before anything occurred. Especially before people would stop being scared to talk to such an angry looking human.

2 cups throughout the morning, just to keep me going until lunchtime at around 1:30.

1 cup between lunch and dinner, usually a smaller one. At this point I’d usually be reaching peak productivity at work, while twitching uncontrollably, so milking the black substance down or sipping as opposed to opening my throat and scalding my esophagus was preferred.

2 cups between dinner and bed. Mind you, dinner occurred around 7, bed occurred around 2 or 3 a.m. Without this boost, there was no way I’d be able to plough through the doldrums of a food coma from dinner straight into either writing or “going out.”

And so, at a total of around 7 cups of coffee per day, the decision was made to cut my intake in half. Never cutting out a period of caffeination (which would surely lead to my heart screeching to a halt faster than you can say, “holy Organic Fair Trade, Batman!”); instead, I pared down my portions.

The admission that my coffee habit may have been a problem also brought to light the other factor holding my back my training. This picture was all too common:

Not only was I drinking coffee and alcohol at the same time regularly, but I was just plain drinking too much. That’s not to say I was acting the way I had as a Freshman in college. I’d managed to cut out the whole “pound vodka until you’re puking and begging for another round of ‘Flip-Cup’ habit.” Rather, I was drinking, on average, 2-3 drinks per night. On weekends (which in this town last from Thursday to Saturday), I was drinking plenty more.

If there’s one thing that could damage a training plan more than a liquid upper that contained no calories, it was nightly intake of downers that came along with fats, extra carbs, and spectacular new levels of hangover because of an organic protein deficiency (brought about, of course, by my newfound vegetarianism).

Again, it was decided that this habit must go.

So for this last week at work, I’ve been tired, I want a steak, and I haven’t cut loose in the evening for longer than I can remember in the past five years. I’m miserable. I’ve been irritable, angry, short-tempered, nervous, downright twitchy at times. Except when I’m working out. I’m running faster than I ever have.

Last night, the third night of my complete sobriety (no meat, less caffeine, no alcohol), I laid awake thinking that my mattress had bed bugs. I kept feeling like my arms were being picked apart, like I had to scratch all the insects off of me. This happened in a half-awake, half-nightmare state for what seemed like the entire evening. It was only when I woke up to find my arms, with streaks of red all across them and across my back where I’d thought the bugs were, that I realized I was going through withdrawal. Later in the day, I passed out at my desk, only to be awoken by a co-worker who assumed I’d been out drinking all night.

Surely I’m not the only one who sees the irony in this. I have been making extensive efforts for two months now to be healthier than I have ever been in my entire life. Healthier than when I was running varsity cross-country in high school. And this is what I get? The symptoms of heroin withdrawal, causing everyone around me to become perturbed at my erratic moods, and resulting in concerned co-workers?

Maybe I’ve just had a few of those habits for too long. Maybe sometimes we need to accept that we’ve wrecked our bodies beyond repair; that there’s no going back and correcting the damage we’ve caused ourselves and those around us. Maybe there’s just not a way to take back any of the horrific things we’ve done and that any attempt to will cause us to be reminded tenfold of our conscious, voluntary, unnecessary mistakes.

I don’t know whether I’ll stick with all of these new habits and continue to let go of all the old ones. I suppose it depends on how I feel about everything after the race. That’s the thing though, no matter how bad things get up until August 31st, I’ve committed to bearing it until that point. Afterwards, I’ll reevaluate again. Afterwards, I’ll see if all of those “mistakes” were really mistakes or if maybe that’s just “how I’m supposed to be.”

But until then, there’s me, there’s healthier living, there’s a personal record to beat. And as always: it’s one foot in front of the other.