I know I'm getting in shape when I start feeling like I'm going to throw up. This is a life-long problem, or at least dates back to my teen-age years, when I began running cross country and left the contents of my stomach along many a race course across Texas. I was reminded of the tendency this morning near the end of a harder-than-normal run when a wave of nausea hit me during the last mile.

It is, perhaps, karma. I quit freshman football after two weeks in high school, after suffering through two-a-days, earning the scorn of my classmates who called me nasty things to my face, and I'm sure worse things behind my back in the wake of the fateful Houston afternoon that I trudged off the field and turned in my pads. I'd been assigned to play offensive line and flat-out hated it. I wasn't cut out for either the size requirement or the mentality it takes to focus solely on running into someone and pushing one way or another depending on the play. It wasn't for me. I knew it. The coaches probably knew it. I hated it. I quit.

That weekend, I went out and got some running shoes, a cheap pair of Reeboks, since my parents knew I had an expensive pair of football cleats sitting in the back of my closet and refused to pony up the bucks for a nice pair of Nikes or Asics.

I showed up the following Monday for cross country practice, having cleared the way with the coach, a priest who served as a freshman theology teacher and drama club moderator as well. He liked to jog, so they gave him this gig as well. The vow of obedience at work.
Fr. Wahl was a scrawny aging hippie priest who addressed us in a singsong voice and for me, was the perfect antidote to the hard-ass football coaches in their sport shorts and whistles who relished in galvanizing the testosterone surging erratically through our 14-year-old bodies, provoking skirmishes among the team in the name of making us ``fooball'' players. This was, after all, Texas High School Football -- even the parochial schools weren't immune.

Cross-country on the other hand was cerebral to the point of geeky, attracting an awkward band of us that I soon fell easily into. Father Wahl would post a schedule for the week and largely leave us alone, sending us out on training runs as a group, occasionally overseeing a track workout. The few pounds I managed to put on for football melted away during the first several weeks and I fell into the rhythm of the training. I found I could anything and everything as running enhanced my already swift teen-age metabolism.

There was one problem: I have a notoriously weak stomach. Distance running is taxing on the body -- despite what my former football teammates would tell you -- and demanded that we push ourselves well beyond normal exertion. For some people, that means their legs or sides cramp painfully. For me, it meant barfing.

It was really only a good race if I threw up since I knew that I then, quite literally, left it all on the course. I often threw up on the verge of the final sprint, as I dug deep for that last bit of energy and came up with whatever was left in my stomach from the night before. I vividly remember puking on myself gliding down to the finish of a race, glancing over to see a crush from a nearby girl's school. Her cheers turned quickly to disgust. What could I do?

During the Peachtree Road Race in 1991, I ran my fastest time ever, and that included and extra 45 seconds or so to step off the course at the top of the biggest hill and barf in an oversized planter.

So when I approached my house the other morning, glistening with sweat, the sun was just coming up and my stomach churned ever so slightly. It was a marvelous feeling.