The Bet

I didn’t wake up one day and decide I’d had enough. I didn’t look at my rapidly expanding gut and decide I needed to get busy living or get busy dying. It started with a simple question from a friend. “Anyone want to run the Houston marathon with me?”

I’d been a runner a long long time ago. Not really competitive but I enjoyed it a lot and was actually pretty decent. I’ve run two marathons, countless 5 and 10ks, and logged over 2000 training miles over the three years I really ran. Unfortunately I graduated from school and life happened. One day 10-11 years later I wake up and I am what  swore I’d never be, a fat.

The query came from a friend we’ll call the Honorable Representative from Sugarland. The name is filled with inaccuracies as he is from Houston not Sugarland, he is in no way associated with politics and he is pretty far from honorable. However, he is a conservative living in The Red State, he enjoys political discussions and given the legal, financial and ethical/moral peccadillos me and the rest of my friends have found ourselves in, he is the most likely of my group of friends to run for political office. 

The Honorable Representative is himself a fluctuating fat (he has swollen and shrunk over the years). About this time last year he was a fat and started training for sprint triathlons. He lost weight training for these, put it back on over the holidays and then lost it again training for sprint and Olympic length races. Since the start of the year he has been training hard and decided to try and run the Houston marathon on January 17, 2010.

So he asked our e-mail chain if anyone was interested in running it with him. I knew I was interested, I knew I wanted to get into running again, I knew I wanted to run Houston again and I knew there was almost no way I’d follow through on the training necessary.

So I did what I thought I needed to do to make myself train. I proposed a bet with the Honorable Representative (THR). The stakes were simple, a $100 a man. He won if he ran in 3:30 or under and I didn’t break 4 hours. I won if he didn’t break 3:30 and I broke 4:00. If we both beat the marks or neither did it was a push. I thought it was a fair bet to push us both.

THR stated he didn’t believe he could break 3:30 and said he’s think about it. Instantly, I knew he would decline. THR has a gambling credo that he sticks by. “I never make a bet I don’t think I can win.” I’ll admit I’m not much of a gambler but it sounds like a good gambling credo when placing college football bets over the phone with a guy named Marco. However, I find it a little ridiculous when its a friendly wager between friends.

Others, on our monumental time waste of an e-mail chain, proposed ideas for the bet while I considered how to revise it to get THR to accept. I decided the manliest thing to do, the thing that would push me the most, and the thing with the most comedic potential would be to race THR heads up. He accepted within seconds of my proposal.

I do not share his gambling credo as I know I cannot win this bet. Even with all of the time I have until the race he simply has too much of a head start in his conditioning but this will push me to train as hard as I can.

Anyway, I’ve picked my training program. I’ll spend a whole lot of time building up my aerobic conditioning and building my base. I’ve been on 3 runs so far, each 2.2 miles, and am averaging just under 10 minute miles.  Now I just need to add 24 miles and cut about a minute per mile average and I’m in the ballgame.

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