A friend of ours is currently taking a running class. Her motivation is that, in two years when she turns 50, she wants to have enough stamina to be able to climb a mountain. What motivates me to run every morning at 5:30 a.m. is that I keep an eye out for spare change…and when I have enough, I can buy a doughnut. I could, of course, buy a doughnut anytime I want: despite the big bucks I get paid as a writer, we are not destitute. This is simply my motivational tool: once I have found enough money…and it has to be while running…I have earned the right to buy a doughnut. This may seem counterproductive, since one of the main reasons I run is to stay healthy. And of all the fad diets that have received media attention over the years, from Dick Gregory’s grape diet to the no-carbohydrates diet, I have never heard of a doughnuts and candy bar diet. Well, I’ve heard of such a diet, just not as a way to lose weight. Or to stay healthy, for that matter. But the beauty of my motivational tool is that it can take me months to find the 64 cents I need (including tax) at one of the two Dunkin Donuts shops that are sometimes on my running route. And in the meantime, I’m actually getting healthy.
I am, for instance, more limber since I started running than I have ever been in my life. Even as a child, tomboy that I was, I could never actually touch my toes, or at least not without a lot of pain and groaning. For years, when I would stretch before softball or volleyball, when everyone else was sitting on the ground with their foreheads practically to their knees as they reached for their toes, I would have a white-knuckle grip on my ankle, trying to at least bend myself at the waist. Now I routinely wrap my fingers around the ball of my foot, my forehead millimeters away from my kneecap. This has caused me to think that if Kathy ever wises up and goes looking for a less high-maintenance girlfriend, I can tell prospective dates, “Don’t be fooled by the gray hair: underneath this silvery domes beats the heart of a gymnast!” With my luck, though, I would be taken literally and ushered to a set of uneven parallel bars, which is not, of course, at all what I would have intended. Fortunately, Kathy has never felt compelled to test my abilities on the balancing beam or the springboard and so far seems committed to putting up with my neurotic ways, including the use of lost change as a motivational tool.
Telling a friend about this recently, she wondered aloud whether I didn’t trip a lot from watching the ground for money all the time. But I keep my eyes pretty focused on the horizon, looking for promising shiny, circular bits up ahead, only just glancing down as I pass by to see if it is actually a coin of the realm or, as is mostly the case, a piece of discarded chewing-gum foil or a dot of tar. Streetlights can play funny tricks on your eyes in the wee hours of the morning before the sun has come up … .
While most of what looks promising in the distance turns out to be nothing useful, I do have a strategy I employ to increase my chances of finding change, thereby speeding along the time till D-Day, which of course has nothing to do with war and everything to do with fried, sugary foods…although, come to think of it, I am fighting some kind of battle here, in which the combatants are my desire to stay healthy and my desire to stay in bed, sleeping. But in case you are fighting a similar battle and want to employ my motivational tool, what will help increase your odds of actually making it to the doughnut shoppe in your hood is to scan very carefully those places where people are likely to be digging in their pockets or purses for something…keys, bus tokens, condoms…thus causing them to be likely to drop change on the ground without necessarily noticing. Thus I often run in the street, where people enter and leave cars a lot, and I scrutinize parking lots and bus stops.
I recently ran…literally…to the nearby Dunkin Donuts and bought my first running-money doughnut. Like any good athlete, though, I have set my sights higher after having met the challenge I set for myself: I am now running my way toward a Burger King egg-and-cheese croissandwich. Only $1.47…and some 700 miles…to go.
yz@press.uchicago.edu