*The views expressed in Truesday are those of the author and do not represent Austinist as a whole. Thank heavens.* -The Editors

Writer's note: this is the longest post I’ve ever written. If you hate long posts, don’t torture yourself any further.

There are many moments over the course of their life when the average person should feel a nip of introspection and take a look back on their time here while asking whether or not they made the right decisions along the way. These questions are typically drifting and general, more aimed at ferreting out some pattern of reason rather than a particular solution.

Should I have spent more time with my parents?

Could I have funded a cure for cancer with all those lotto tickets I bought?

Was that Oklahoma City hooker back in ‘83 a drugged and mis-shaven orangutan?

Probably, for all three accounts.

So there’s the past to consider: simple, obvious enough, and likely deserving a whole dozen or so therapy sessions in its own right. But what about the more anxiety-laden CURRENT situations? Something that is “en route”. Being in the middle of what is turning out to feel like a horrendous error in judgment, but being too invested in the thing to have a clue as to how to back out?

The story of my life and shit. Well, that might be a bit overly dramatic. But if not for my entire life, then it’s certainly the story of my weekend. Really, any weekend where I’ve agreed to jog over six miles in a competitive format is likely to rank high up there on my list of bad-decision weekends.

The downfall began with my confused person standing in front of Club Deville… hm. Wait, that’s not right. The downfall actually started weeks earlier, with me agreeing to run a 10k portion of a Sunday marathon relay (Silicon Labs), where one person runs a 12k then passes some sort of baton off to the next who runs a 10k, then another runs 10k, then two others run a 5k each. These five race legs join up like Voltron and BAM, they form a whole marathon’s distance. High-fives and hell-yeahs.

10k is 6.2 miles. Even though that's further than I'd ever bothered running before, I figured ‘hey, I can already shuffle through 4 miles, right? What’s 2 more miles?' Indeed. What’s 2 more miles other than a distance that most people refuse to bike, let alone travel at speed by foot? Idiot.

So I signed up to race amongst a trusted team of five. I had no idea what I was getting into. But the sense of righteous entitlement flooded over me JUST for having signed up for the thing. Was it a race for cancer or some shit? To fund playgrounds for orphans? Who knows. The peacock of righteous entitlement doesn’t need the whole story to take roost.

That was weeks ago, and gloriously insufficient training occurred between then and the day of the race. But my false feelings of superior entitlement were imperviously strong throughout the entire period.

The downfall continued with my confused person standing in front of Deville last Friday afternoon, wondering why the hell they were no longer open for happy hour. I will likely delve into this issue further at a later date, as it should not go unnoticed by the drinking majority that this establishment has, for reasons as yet to be understood, effectively killed its status as a bar and has since moved itself into the realm of music venue.

I do not understand why a place cannot be both. I’m sure there’s some weird-ass pseudo-business explanation for such things, but I’d likely get lost in the jargon and all would remain a mystery in my mind.

So, Friday afternoon at five. I’m standing in front of a chained-door’d Deville, wondering where in the hell I’m going to start my night. Twenty minutes passes and I’m STILL standing there, with my shitty phone in hand, sweating in the sinking sun, STILL wondering what the hell should become my new Friday night destination. As silly as it may sound, it really seemed like a big deal at that moment. A decision which should involve some real thought. Nothing to jump into lightly. Not like a 10k or anything.

Calls came in, accords were made, and a new drunk-making destination was chosen.

After five golden hours at Ginger Man, our wayward group was lively drunk and extremely loud at the dart boards, a game which we’d all play just as well with our feet. I attribute my particular rowdiness with a personal inability to gauge the strength of Belgian beer with any usable accuracy. By 11pm, we were out and on the move, stumbling around the warehouse district and being a general nuisance to all the sober folk who had just arrived to START their drinking. That march led on to several old haunts including Red Fez, where some sort of fracas broke out involving broken bottles of beer, some rather angry rotund ladies who claimed they were pregnant (at Red Fez on Friday? Is you mad, woman?), and our hapless vessels of vacant character. Details are hard to pin down, but we were allowed to leave the place without involving the authorities. Then we somehow teleported to Whisky Bar, where in some strange attempt at free-form injured-pelican-dancing, I managed to flail my body around like some sort of half dead-head, half epileptic freakshow, which pretty much cleared out the back room. I vaguely remember being asked by someone of large proportions to remove myself from the premises, but I’m not sure if this was done by someone acting in any official sort of capacity. Could have simply been my own subconscious. Matters not. We bailed out in favor of avoiding another duel with touchy locals, pregnant or otherwise.

The cab that dropped us off at Magnolia peeled out as he left, putting an exclamation on his pleasure at bidding us farewell. I don’t remember a whole lot about the meal itself, beyond my not wanting much to do with the food, but all of us wanting to yell a-lot. Yelling inappropriate stories of racial, sexual, scatological or any other patently offensive material. Surprisingly, I do believe we were allowed to leave that establishment on our own accord. I have a 50% success rate with Magnolia in this capacity.

Saturday morning was particularly devastating, and not just for the effects of reckless boozing. Apparently every ragweed decided it was time to start procreating on Friday evening, so my crippling hang over was multiplied a solid fifty times over by the devastating effects of an allergic fever. I was completely immobilized by roving headaches, fits of sneezing, and a lava flow of oozing mucus from any and all holes in my head. Throw on some nausea, some random painful bruises (probably from falling down at various times), and an intense feeling of impending dread, and you’ve got the sum total of Saturday existence.

That fun continued through the entire day on Saturday. Yeah, I know: wah-wah, boo-hoo, fucktard drank a bunch and now has violent poo fits and rushing pains throughout his body. Whatever man. We all get it: kids, drinking is bad for you, find other and better drugs to take. Or whatever else your parents used to pretend to believe. It’s only the setup to the situation on stilts here.

I stayed in on Saturday night like a Pensioner, hoping some modest rest would do my body best for what I knew was lurking mere hours from then, waiting for me in the sun’s earliest moments of the following day. Two Benadryls before dark and I was dead amongst all other existence, in a vain effort to ward off the allergy monkey.

Sunday finally crawls its way into my life, and I’m greeted by my girlfriend pushing me awake, asking me whether or not I’m late to the Marathon Relay.

Marathon Relay? Fuckmenuts. In my pill’d haze, I totally slept through my alarm. I was scheduled to run the “third leg” of the thing. 10k.

Third leg. That’s so sweet.

I rush out the door in my sleeveless t-shirt, breath all stank nasty, with a dirty headband above my brow. I was driving blind with crusty eye-snot. I ended up parking all kinds of jacked-up, after driving around some weird-ass cone barrier thing which had nothing to do with the race route, up and over the Hooter’s lot, and into a Runtex spot. I have no idea whether it was legal or not. Parking lines were poorly marked. I was delirious, coughing up phlegm, and seriously late to run further than I’d ever run in my entire life.

At this point, I still did not understand how this race would work. Would I be waiting in some distant place, by myself, for a teammate to run up and hand me a baton or what? No. It was far more logical than that. Each race leg simply ran half its distance from the starting point along a prescribed route, and then back to hand off the baton. Logical. Easy breezy.

I found our team’s camp amongst the tent city that was Auditorium Shores, sneezed a few dozen times, and then drank some weird-ass energy drink thing for breakfast. It tasted like carbonated ear wax. The can was radioactive orange. It got warm FAR faster than I believe it should have.

But it was all I could stomach before my leg was up.

When I was handed the rubberband “baton”, I was dead set on taking it easy. 6.2 miles is a long fucking way to jog. Especially with a pint of snot in my lungs. I figured it best to keep the pace modest.

Mile markers 1-2 (Auditorium shores to 1st and Congress, then north on Congress toward Capital).

Pretty cool running so far. Nearing the Capital. Nothing too terrifying, no snapping or popping of body parts. Just a bunch of shaved-head dudes running past me like I was another spectator. I never passed anyone during this leg of the race. I was however, passed, repeatedly by significantly older women. Like, double my age. And to make matters more awesomer, most of them were real cheery about it and not at all out of breath. All buddy-buddy and shit. Like “you’ll get there champ! Keep it up!”

Keep it up? What the fuck is that supposed to mean?

I’m trying to avoid all forms of blanket misogyny here, but when a seemingly endless train of sixty year-old women with pink foam hand weights blows by your struggle-wheezing ass after you’ve only covered two flat miles, well, that’s some big suck right there. Big ups for them, but dear lord that's some sad suck for me. I cried on the inside.

And a little on the outside.

Mile markers 3-5 (around the Capital, back down Congress to river, West on Caesar Chavez toward Lamar).

Mile three had me starting to get The Fear. Sure, I’d been sucking air pretty hard since the baton handoff at the start, but this was the point where the snot factor began to bring me serious worry. The main issue was that a thick slick had formed on my facial hair, trailing down from my nose to my chin. A snotstache. It would have been quite amusing if it hadn’t been practically suffocating my struggling ass. All attempts by me to wipe it off ended with it simply spreading to my cheeks and arms. I simply had to get used to its presence.

The waterfolk were not so understanding of me as a potential health risk. They repeatedly winced when I approached, snotstretched hand out, fumbling against theirs as I knocked water all over us both. I know that after I slumped off they felt ill at not being sure whether their arm was covered in spilled water or whatever the hell it was that glistened off my face. When I grunted my thanks, bits of liquid-ish shit shrapneled out off my mouth. My decrepit appearance made absolutely no sense amongst all the other lean and temper-breath’d runners around me.

I had already passed the Capital, which was all up-goddamn-hill (this makes sense since it’s up from the river but you never think about that shit until you have to huff it up that fucker with purpose). I considered laying down on the dark side of the Capital building, where no onlookers might see me, to take a long vomit and a nap. But there was this one cute and smiling hipster chick with a fancy coffee walking about the area, and I was afraid that if I stopped to make like a yack-hydrant she might notice and say something evilly clever to slight my efforts thus far (you know how those clever, evil hipster chicks can be). Then I’d have to kill her with my stank Asics, smugly drink her sweet coffee, and then go hide in Bolivia for a decade or so until the story died off the newspapers.

I’m too lazy to run for that long, so I chose to keep struggling through the race instead.

The way back to the river from the Capital was the total tits! There were more horrified water-giver people, who seemed fearfully entertained to watch me pour water all in my eyes instead of in my mouth. If I had been able to see straight by then, it might have had an effect on me. But no. I was falling toward the river, using the cups of water to wash the snot off my face, blind as the fucking bats beneath the bridge. Based on my really-hazy readings of the Mile Marker signs, I estimated that I had a hair over a mile left once I hit the river. 6.2 miles total, and Marker 3 was about 2 miles back, so, I felt pretty good about things. Well, “good” is a relative term here, for sure. I was exhausted, snot all down the front of my neck, and my nips were starting to rub raw against my t-shirt. But, no matter. It was to be over soon. Maybe.

By the time I actually hit Caesar Chavez and hung a right to head toward Lamar, my mood was pretty high. And looking back, I realize how unfortunate that was, because it gave me a false sense of potential accomplishment. Turns out that I was much, much further from the finish than I had initially calculated. Mile Marker 5, just ahead of me, was clearly nowhere near the fifth mile for the 10k runners. It was closer to the halfway point. From the long line of runners I could manage to see ahead of me, the running trail went on and on and on and on. From what I could tell, I still had to go all the way down the river to Austin High, then truck my tired ass back on up, then over the bridge, back into Auditorium Shores. That’s at least a three mile loop right there.

Angry depression set upon me with the subtly of rabies.

Mile Marker… whatever man. Apparently those Mile Marker signs were for the 12k route, not the 10k. Damnit all to hell.

To say that I was overwhelmed with frustration would be an understatement akin to saying that a person being eaten alive by cockroaches was disappointed with how their life-light finally blew out. I was livid, convinced that the race planners had conspired with each other to get me super drunk on Friday, give me horrific allergies on Saturday, secretly extend my 10k to a 50k on Sunday, and that they were likely in the process of towing my truck to Zimbabwe.

Not knowing how else to express my rage, I operated with what I had available to me: I took an extremely angry piss in a port-o-let somewhere near the Mopac entrance ramp near Austin High. At least I think it was a port-o-let. It might have been someone’s car. Or a phone booth. Whatever it was, the heat inside it was murderous. But my piss-fueled anger was enough to carry me through the added discomfort. And that’s where, honestly, it all came to a head.

So to speak.

The snot all down my face, the shin splints, the throbbing head, the probably-towed truck, the blindness… all that shit. I had made a bungled series of personal, intentional choices which had placed me there in that piss box, and it was just plain killing me. The lot of it. I was dead in the middle of what could have turned out to top my list of shitty mornings: prone, pained, and likely peeing on myself in a sun-baking container of other people’s feces.

Reverent, but understandably dismissive of my failing condition, I set myself back on the track to set a record for Worst 10k Time Ever Done By a Mammal Under the Age of 102. Yet, I even passed someone on my way in. Of course she passed me right back after I had to start walking due to fear that my legs would never be able to bend again if I kept “moving”, but whatever. When the chips are down, I take what victories come my way, however briefly held.

Once I hit the 1st Street bridge and could see the finish line (along with my truck still in the Runtex parking lot), I actually picked up the pace. By that I mean I actually started concentrating on speed rather than simply staving off organ failure. I ignored all my previous transgressions that weekend, along with all the onlookers who I could hear cheering me down the finish lane with “come on big fella! The beer garden’s open!”

Beer garden? That some sort of joke? Chalked that one up to delirium, even though I later learned that there was indeed a beer garden available on the premises. I’ve also since been told that the carbohydrates from beer are especially delicious after a long run, and that the body appreciates them in a most special way. I will probably never know anything about this, as I tend to drink heavily BEFORE running, and therefore don’t really have any desire to do anything beyond coma-sleep afterward.

The finish line itself is something of a blur for me. I know I got there because my teammate took the baton-thing and went on to great victory. I vaguely remember laying down next to the tented water tables where I repeatedly emptied bottles of water over my half-naked body, and taking my shoes off, much to the dismay of all the other runners who had to step over me. I lay there for a good ten minutes, in dead grass and dried dog poo, wondering why I bothered to go through all that. What did I take away from it? Is there really anything beneficial to take away from triumph over self? What if your self is so bumbling and idiotic that any effort against it (however slight or accidental) will end in victory? Why the hell haven’t I seen an allergist for this goddamn pollen hatred? Is that pee scent coming from my shoes? Where could I find some decent coffee in the area?

Oh yeah. Coffee. Fuck it.

Maybe Bolivia wasn’t such a bad idea after all.