Finding It: And Finally Satisfying My Hunger for Life (25 page)

I also really liked that Christopher has a normal-looking physique, not one of those over-pumped, steroid-infused bodies you see in Hollywood gyms. Don’t get me wrong; he is taut and in enviable shape. But his buffness seemed accessible, the male version of what I was going for (sort of). He had been a diver in college and has a few graduate degrees. The man knows his stuff.

Within minutes of meeting me, he had me on the treadmill. It was only after I had broken a sweat that I began to find out about his background. He later told me that that had been the point. He didn’t lay out a plan as much as he got me going. Only after he had me walking at a brisk pace did he start to ask questions about my general health, whether I took medication, how my knees and ankles were, and so on.

“Do you ice your knees after running?” he had asked.

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t run.”

“You will soon enough—and you’ll ice your knees afterward.”

I shook my head. I told him flat-out that I would do anything other than run. I wasn’t a runner. I hated running. I didn’t have the long, sinewy body of a runner. I wasn’t light on my feet. I might
have tried joking that the only time I ran was mealtime, but Christopher didn’t crack a smile.

“You’re going to run,” he said.

This became a persistent theme through the holidays. Christopher knew that I was distracted and not yet ready to make a serious commitment. I had too much on my plate, literally and figuratively. But upon reconnecting in mid-January, he brought up the running again. He was adamant about it, too. Just as I was, in my determination not to run. I felt pushed at the pace he had me going on the treadmill, a fast walk.

“I’ve heard you loud and clear, telling me that you’re not a runner,” he said.

“I’m not.”

“Well, I’m still going to turn you into a runner,” he said.

“You don’t understand what I’m saying,” I said.

“No, you don’t understand,” he said. “There’s no way to succeed in this process if I don’t get you running.”

We may have sounded contentious, but we weren’t. I laughed more than I probably should have as Christopher pushed me into new territory. It helped to have Tom around to make fun of. Tom is a natural athlete, but back then in terms of running, he was more a sprinter than a distance man. As Christopher started us out, we were like the tortoise and the hare. I loved passing him. I don’t know why—I’m sure it’s related to having grown up with three brothers—but I got the biggest kick out of looking over my shoulder and saying, “See ya!”

Mind you, after I gave in to Christopher about running, he came over the next day and said he was going to teach me how to run. Teach me how to run? Although I had said I wasn’t a runner,
I knew how to run. Who doesn’t know how to run? You walk real fast, and then faster, until you are running.

I had been running with my brothers since I played my first game of touch football. As a teenager, I had been a stud on the
Battle of the Network Stars
TV special. I had video as proof. It was me and Kristy McNichol going neck and neck in the sprints. I still roused Tom and the boys into an annual touch football game at the beach. I knew how to frickin’ run.

I don’t mean to drone on, but this was like being told I didn’t know how to pray. Although I had limited knowledge about the rituals and beliefs of different religions, I suspect that most people, when praying to God, or whatever they call their Higher Power, say basically the same thing: “Hello, God, I know you’re busy. But if you have time and an extra miracle, I want to thank you for my day, and maybe ask a favor…”

While I may be right about prayer, boy, did I learn that I was wrong about running. Christopher explained that while I did know how to run fast over a short distance, I didn’t know how to do it over a long haul. As soon as he said that, bells went off in my head. He may as well have been describing the problem faced by 95 percent of everyone who has ever gone on a diet and then regained weight, including me: We knew how to lose weight. But we didn’t know how to keep it off over the long distance, over the rest of our lives. Wasn’t that what this was all about, anyway, what I was trying to figure out about maintenance? It’s part of what I’d been looking to find.

Christopher started me out slowly, at a speed that was equivalent to about 4.2 miles per hour. I was still walking, just incrementally faster than I had been going on the treadmill. He explained that
getting fit was a process—an “evolution” was how he put it—and he was planting seeds that he could build on. First a fast walk, then a slow run, and then who knew what was next. His goal was to give me as much as I could do, then push me a little more.

“Oh God,” I groaned.

“Don’t worry,” he said.

“Tell me that when I’m icing my knees,” I laughed.

One day he came over and said we were going for a run around the neighborhood. We didn’t go far, maybe a mile. About two blocks into it, he stopped me and explained that running outdoors was different from running on a treadmill, as if I wasn’t already able to make that comparison. I was panting hard.

“You’re going too fast,” he said.

“This sounds like the discussion we had two weeks ago,” I said. “I’m running.”

“But you don’t have to do it like you’re trying out for the Olympics,” he said. “There’s no one chasing you. You aren’t trying to get away from anyone.”

He reiterated that running was about consistency and endurance, not speed. By this time, with our daily workouts, he had said this to me so often that I realized it wasn’t because I was dumb or didn’t get it. It was because I needed the reminder. Repetition wasn’t necessary; it was essential. He also corrected my posture and taught me to breathe in every couple of steps and then exhale over the same number. And he reminded me to be patient with myself.

“It’s a slow build,” he said. “You don’t get results overnight.”

I understood. I don’t know what clicked, but one day after Christopher left, I started to laugh. This whole bit about running suddenly struck me as ironic. As I later told Tom, I had been running
my whole life. Not in the way Christopher had me running. I had been running away from things. I had been avoiding the issues that had come to define and then take over my life. And when you run like that, you have no idea where you are going. It’s painful.

But now I was running toward something. I had an actual goal. I felt much better about everything. I actually looked forward to pushing myself every day to get stronger. I even began to look forward to running with Christopher.

Besides my getting in better shape, Christopher promised that I would be able to decide what I wanted my body to look like. No one had ever said that to me. Nor had I ever thought about changing any part of my body other than my weight. For that reason alone, I had always shied away from strapless gowns and tank tops, two styles I would have loved to wear on numerous occasions. But I didn’t like my arms.

“You’re serious?” I asked.

He nodded.

“In that case, I’d like to be five-seven, long, and slender,” I said.

“Within reason.”

“Then don’t make promises you can’t keep,” I said with a grin as I huffed and puffed.

“We’ll get to a point where you can tell me you want a line here or you want this gone or a curve there.”

I slapped my rear end.

“Right here,” I said. “Make it smaller. I have to fit into a bikini by March.”

“I know,” he said, laughing. “I may have heard that before.”

To be clear, Christopher explained that he couldn’t train me and focus only on my butt. It wasn’t going to work. He warned
that I would probably lose weight and see more definition everywhere except my butt because my body would try to hang on to its shape there. It would be the last place where we would see change.

Speaking of weight, at that time, I weighed between 131 and 133 depending on the day. I decided that 132 pounds was where I would plant my stake. If I got any higher, I had to sound the alarm and get down. But I figured that in order to feel good about seeing myself in a bikini on film, I needed to get down into the neighborhood of 125 to 122 pounds. Christopher assured me that I could do it.

Soon he was talking to me about increasing my metabolism, something I had always assumed was slow and set. But now, he wanted to “get my burn rate up,” as he put it. According to him, my basal metabolic rate—or BMR—was about 1,300, meaning my body burned that many calories per day just by being alive. He wanted to raise that number at least 10 percent, making my body even more efficient at burning calories. Through exercise, he planned to get me to the point where on some days I would be burning upwards of 3,500 calories.

“In one day?” I asked.

“Yep,” he said.

“I’m going to be able to eat anything I want.”

“No, you aren’t,” he said. “In fact, I want you looking even more carefully at what you’re putting into your body.”

“I eat well,” I said.

“I know. I’ve seen the commercials,” he said, smiling. “But I want you drinking more water. And when you want to have that extra glass of wine, I want you to consider that it’s going to negate half of our workout session. So you’ll have to ask yourself whether that extra glass is worth it.”

“Kind of strict, don’t you think?”

“You’re in training,” he said. “Right?”

I was, indeed. As proof, our workouts grew more intense. Christopher showed up mid-morning, after I’d had my coffee and worked on the crossword. We ran through the neighborhood, working up from one mile to two, then three. I thought I was going to die. We also did sit-ups, push-ups, and step-ups on the coffee table or some other piece of furniture indoors or outdoors, depending on the weather. He didn’t use much equipment; my body weight supplied the resistance, and boy, did it try to resist.

He changed our routines regularly so I wouldn’t get bored, but we always ran. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t. Let me say this: As much as I ran and would continue to run for months, I hated every single step. It never became easy for me. But I liked the mechanics of putting one foot in front of the other and carrying my own weight. I liked the runner’s high I got after about twenty minutes. Most of all, I liked the satisfaction I got from achieving a goal every day.

There was something profound about the way I had relearned this most basic activity and rethought its significance. It symbolized all the other things in my life that I had either relearned or was in the process of relearning, including how to eat, how to choose my words carefully when in an argument, how to exercise patience, how to forgive, and how to appreciate the little things in life.

I was also re-envisioning my life in terms of who I was and who I wanted to be. I now saw it as a process, like running, something I worked at in little, achievable increments every day.

On January 20, the day Obama was sworn into office, I completed my first Elevado, a four-and-a-half mile run along a neighborhood
street of that name in Beverly Hills. It was a favorite run of Christopher’s, one he liked because it was super pretty and a fairly significant distance. I have to be honest: when he said it was about four-and-a-half miles, I thought “no way,” even though we had been training for it.

Once we began, though, I focused on getting to the halfway point. That’s all I thought about. I just wanted to know how much farther I had to go. After we turned around, I counted the steps back. As Christopher had said, it was all mental—as is much of life. Indeed, at the end, I couldn’t believe I had run 4.2 miles straight, without stopping.

“Well, believe it, baby,” he said. “And ice those knees.”

I couldn’t believe it, but I started to feel like an athlete. Less than two weeks later, I met Christopher at the beach and we went for a run. I worked through the first twenty minutes, then felt my endorphins kick in, and suddenly I was, dare I say, enjoying myself. Christopher and I traded advice about our relationships as we ran. Gradually, though, I stopped talking and concentrated on my breathing. Christopher wondered if I was sick of listening to him talk. No, I said, I wanted to concentrate.

“I’m enjoying my runner’s high,” I said.

“Oh, now you’re a runner,” he laughed.

I would never say that. But at the end, Christopher said we had gone 5½ miles. He also said that it was the first time he had seen definition in my legs. Really? The next morning I put on tight athletic shorts and wore them the whole day. My body was starting to change and I wanted to see it.