Track Rubber and Blackberry | Reflections on Addiction, Anxiety and My Return to Running

by Chase Parnell — December 1, 2019

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I always tell people that despite my forays into alcohol and drug use, the only thing I was ever truly addicted to was nicotine. My first cigarette was one I took from a Fred Meyer’s ashtray in 4th grade. I don’t know whose disgusting tongue waggled it around their mouth, but at 10, you don’t think of such things. This cigarette was nearly spent, just enough of those finely packed strands of cinnamon-colored tobacco left to make it a worthy snag. I concealed it from my mom by holding it in my palm and pulling my sleeve down over my wrist so she couldn’t see it on the drive home. Frankly, I’m surprised I managed this as I was probably being incredibly awkward. I remember smelling that stale smoky odor so I cracked the window a hair. Perhaps she thought I merely passed wind. 

Just Another Day at the Donut Shop

I couldn’t tell you exactly why I took it, but the seed may have been planted earlier that day at Winchell’s Donuts. Smoking was prevalent back in the 90s, and get this, people were allowed to do it in restaurants and airports and donut shops. Some of my earliest memories are of going to Winchell’s in Eugene, Oregon with my mom. She’d get her coffee in a tall styrofoam cup with an old school white plastic lid. She’d peel back the tear tab and sip through a ginormous opening that nobody would put up with today.

My senses were always overwhelmed by the donuts behind the glass; eclairs, bear claws, fritters and jelly filled. I liked maple old fashions, coconut flaked classics, and those pink-glazed fluffy twisty french crullers. I’d do my scan of the offerings, tell mom what I wanted, and watch with intensity as the workers placed the goods in a white paper sachet along with the used squares of that semi-translucent grab-paper. We’d sit as far away from the smokers as we could, but they were hard to avoid. Every table was adorned with those brown circular plastic ashtrays with little notches around the rim for resting your smoke.  

The smokers were the regulars as my mom would call them. By my memory, they were literally there every time we went, and we went to Winchell’s a lot. Coffee, donuts, and cigarettes – a trifecta of stimulus and pleasure. They were mostly old ladies with bright silver or shamelessly dyed hair, fresh out of the curlers. They were skinny as flagpoles and wore giant rimmed glasses and gaudy jewelry. They’d sit and chat quietly, all while slurping, gorging, licking sugar from their fingers, and making love to their cigarettes. Surely they all must be dead now. 

Did they plant the seed that caused me to nab that cigarette butt? Did they trigger an inquisitive synapse in my brain that made me want to try one for myself? Or was it just the presets of my hardwiring? I knew by then that smoking was bad, so of course I needed to do it. 

Either way, upon arrival at our home on Bailey Hill Road, I hopped out of our minivan with urgency. I had a cigarette and I had to find my brother Eric and tell him what I’d done. I pulled him into my room, extended my hand, palm up, and presented the contraband. I was beaming with pride — like an Olympic gymnast — I’d just flung myself off the high bar and stuck the landing. I am a badass mo fo. 

Let’s go smoke it, I said.  

My brother was two years older than me and he’d never even had one — a couple of virgins. He was game, so off we went, up into the field on the hill above our house, concealed by tall grass and rhododendrons on a fine summer afternoon. I remember Eric was wearing an STP t-shirt, which my parents probably only allowed because they didn’t know it stood for Stone Temple Pilots. We listened to Pearl Jam, Green Day, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers too, but nothing touched Nirvana. Kurt Cobain was sacrosanct. 

It turns out lighting a cigarette is more complicated than it appears on TV. You can’t just light the end of it and then suck it. There is a proper process. One must place the flame to the end of the cigarette and suck simultaneously to pull the heat from the fire to light and burn the tobacco and encasing paper. We won’t even mention inhaling here, it would be years before we found out what that was. On this day, the thing kept going out. I might have puffed out trace amounts of smoke, likely with my mouth open wide and lips curled back like I was Tony Montana smoking a cuban.

Twenty-four years later and the memory is still cemented in stone.

I Smoked It And I Liked It. 

It wasn’t until two years later, at 12, that I had my next real encounter with cigarettes. By then, my Dad had moved our family out east to a suburb of Rochester, New York. This time around it was Eric who got the cigarette and to my surprise, he’d learned how to smoke it properly. We were walking down our street at twilight with a couple of other neighborhood hoodlums, a regular pack of suburban riffraff. Eric pulled out a cigarette, snapped open a Zippo lighter and lit it like a pro. He told me to suck on it and breathe it all the way down into my lungs, then blow it out quickly and do it again a few times. 

You’ll feel a buzz, he said. 

A what?  

Just do it. 

What big brother says, little brother does. And sure enough, a couple fierce drags and I was flying. My face tingled and I was smiling like a four-year old on Christmas morning. I’d never felt anything quite like it. And sheesh, just writing about it now puts a craving in my stomach.

I couldn’t tell you what brand of cigarette we smoked on those two occasions, but I can tell you which I came to adore — Marlboro Regulars. We called them Marb Reds because they came in a white and red box. Whatever combination of carcinogens were soaked into that particular variety of tobacco were the kinds that I loved.

I think this is how a lot of addiction stories begin. You try something and you either like it or you don’t. And I liked it. Once I had my first buzz, I was indeed hooked. But I wasn’t an instantaneous chain-smoker because its hard to smoke when you live with your parents. In fact, it wasn’t until my senior year of high school that I fully submitted to nicotine. Before then, believe it or not, I was a runner. And smoking and running go together like ketchup and marshmallows.

Once I quit running in the middle of my senior track season, I immediately became a 15 cigarette a day guy and maintained that level for the next five years. Not that bad comparatively speaking. Only about one per hour while awake. But it was a glorious love affair, apart from the hacking up multi-colored gelatinous phlegm in the shower thing. Probably some lung bits mixed in there too.

I’ve pondered a lot lately about why some people pick up a vice and then never let it go. Whether it’s cigarettes, alcohol, gambling, sex, food, gossiping, lying, or really anything that causes oneself harm. Why do some people give in for the long haul and some manage to quit? 

For whatever reason, I had it in my mind that smoking was bad and that ultimately I needed to quit. It’s like anything I suppose. The internal governor will impose its will and you don’t have much of a say in the matter. Where we get that governor, however, is a question for the ages. Upbringing? God? Stardust? Lineage of ape? That’s for you to decide. 

At 21, I was thoroughly addicted and quitting on a regular basis, at least once a week. Back in Oregon for college, I had an apartment bordering the university in Eugene. I’d splash across some puddles to the Hilyard Street Market and get a pack of my Marb Reds. I’d smoke one and throw out the pack. Nineteen cigarettes into the trash. I did this all the time. It was madness. Cycles of desire and guilt, desire and shame, desire and pain. 

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Cigarettes were the answer to all my problems, the relief to all stress, the pin to pop my ever-present bubble of tension, and yet they were simultaneously the daily reminder of how I was shitting away a life of great potential.

The Defining Moment. 

I do end up beating cigarettes but not in any sort of valorous or courageous manner. What finally got me there was a budding relationship with anxiety, which would become both my greatest blessing and my greatest curse. In the fall of 2006, just before my 22nd birthday, I had one of those ridiculously stereotypical panic episodes where you think you’re dying. Had I known at the time the symptoms of anxiety or even just how common panic attacks actually are, I probably wouldn’t have reacted so poorly. 

The day after a night of alcohol and cocaine (sorry mom), I was in the midst of my usual recovery routine of watching movies and hydrating, when I began to feel sad. I couldn’t place the feeling but it was tinged with an edge of desperation. I remember trying to call my girlfriend (I use that term loosely as we were both routinely unfaithful) in Portland but I couldn’t get ahold of her. I wanted to pout about my life and I could usually count on her to lift me up in an enabler kind of way. But I called and called and she just wouldn’t answer, which was uncharacteristic of her because she also had an unhealthy dependency on me.

After awhile my general sadness turned into some elevated breathing, which turned into some sweating, which turned into some nausea, which turned into some fuzzy tingling in my hands, which turned into some inability to bend my arms or legs, which rapidly led to some very pathetic version of myself laying on the ground in the hallway and yelling to my roommate to call 911. He came out and saw my rigor mortis shake dance and called without hesitation.

And there you have it. That charming bit of history was my definitive before and after moment. I was never the same after that. Eventually, the paramedics arrived and told me I’d had a panic attack. From then on I was no longer shielded from anxiety because I now knew what it was…and I had it.  

Thereafter, every “bad” thing I did became a trigger for my anxiety, likely because I had my cute little episode after a night of debauchery, so I assumed there was a link. And because I had always placed cigarettes in the bad column, they became anxiety-inducing as well. I said earlier that anxiety was a blessing. That’s because it forced me to quit…everything. I could smoke, I could drink, I could drug, but if I did, it was a round of sweats and throat constrictions for me! Oh goody!

On April 15, 2008, at 23, I finally had my last nicotine. It just wasn’t worth the fight anymore. Unfortunately, my last was in the form of a giant dip of Kodiak wintergreen chew. To this day, I regret it wasn’t a Marb Red. 

Track Rubber and Blackberry 

Three days after I quit, I went on a long walk along the vegetative banks of the Willamette River in Eugene. As I ambled along in quiet contemplation, I passed Marist Catholic High School and caught a whiff of something that I couldn’t immediately put my finger on. It wasn’t the gas station or tire center, but it was of that ilk. After what must have been a minute of standing there, nose perked, it clicked. It was track rubber. My eyes darted to the black oval just beyond a chainlink fence. Once placed, I allowed my mind to spin me back through time to my days as little scrapper on the Track City Track Club. Track rubber smell, heightened by the heat of this warm spring day, turned me into that little boy again, the one who would not allow himself to be beaten. I could see myself sprinting down the homestretch, head tilting from side-to-side as it always did when I ran hard. I see my scrapbook full of blue ribbons from the all-comers meets held at historic Hayward Field. Who was this boy? And what could he have become without the mess I made for him?

Eventually, I uprooted my feet and walked a few paces further down the path, trying to shake this feeling of regret. But then I was stopped by a wholly different scent. This one I placed immediately. Again from my childhood. How very strange…blackberries. And sure enough, I look to the opposite side of the path and see blackberry brambles lining the bank of the river.

Once again, childhood memories flood in. I see my mom rummaging around the kitchen cabinets. She hands each of us boys a pail of one size or another. She tells us to not come back to the house until they’re full of blackberries. So I’m off, trudging up the hills, past the very spot where Eric and I would later smoke that first cigarette. I arrive at the giant wall of blackberry bushes that formed the boundary line of our property. They were so large we used to build forts inside them. With my pail in one hand, I’d weasel my other through the thorny vines to the biggest and juiciest blackberries you’d ever seen. All you had to do was touch them, as light as a feather, and the ripened plumps would fall into your palm. Upon examination, the place where the blackberry pulled away from the stem would be deep purple, pooling with juice. That’s how you knew they were perfectly ripe. 

Back on the path, it dawned on me that I hadn’t been able to smell anything like this in years. Sure, I could smell strong aromas if they were right in front of my face, but because smoking ruins your sense of smell, I realized that after just three days of not smoking, my sense of smell was returning.  

But why such vivid memories? I believe now that I was drawing strength from the purity and innocence of my childhood, before things turned south. In some strange way, that boy would help me break free from the mess I’d made of my life. Because if he was still in me, then I still had something of value, because he didn’t do anything wrong. He didn’t mess anything up.

And that’s when it happened. After being completely divorced from running for five years, my body began to do it before I even told it to. There, on that winding bike path under a canopy of riverside maple trees, sandwiched between track rubber and blackberries, I began to run. Those first steps felt like I had a strong tailwind pushing me to get going, move forward and get started. I lifted my knee and extended my foot to catch my forward fall, which caused my other leg to swing like a pendulum, catching up and initiating a stride. As if by memory, my shoulders rolled back and my arms bent to 90 degree angles, the runner’s arm carriage. 

I couldn’t believe how awkward my gait felt though. It was like I was running for the first time. Quickly the aerobic output caught up with my lungs and I was heaving like I’d just come up for air. I felt my eyes open wide and focus. It felt so good to run again.

Despite my damaged lungs, my 40 pounds of extra weight, and my tenuous mental health situation, I was floating in the clouds. How could I have quit this? It was as if I could feel my body thanking me in those moments.

I only made it about a half mile on that April day, and you’d of thought I just finished a marathon by the way I was bent over, hands to quads, holding myself upright. One thing was certain though, I was back.

Oh, the places you’ll go. 

I could not have possibly imagined where running would take me once it reentered my atmosphere. I couldn’t have known that just four months later I’d run a 10k road race and finish in 44 minutes with an average pace of 7:05 per mile. I ran my heart out to get that time, sprinting neck and neck with a boy who must have been 9 years old. As a 4:25 miler in high school, I was lightyears from where I’d been, but I was quickly improving.

I couldn’t have known that I would keep running and eventually run a 2:35 marathon, averaging under 6 minutes per mile for 26.2. I couldn’t have know that this Marlboro man would go on to finish as the 8th place American male at the Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc, a 103-mile circumnavigation around the tallest peak in the Alps. I couldn’t have known that I would meet Nikki through the running community. For Christ’s sake, my children literally would not exist today had I not started running again!

But perhaps most importantly, I couldn’t have known that I’d reconnect with myself during this process, that I’d begin to believe in myself again, and that maybe, just maybe, I could make a 180 degree turn and not only salvage my life but create one I was proud of.

Falling Snow 

The funny thing is that despite these transformative experiences, I’ll be the first to admit that much of life still remains a mystery to me. I really hope that one day I’ll be able to reflect on my life and take joy in seeing how the pieces to the puzzle all fit together. I wouldn’t be surprised though if this often-referenced concept is a fantasy. What’s more likely is that I’ll arrive at a place of acceptance and wish I hadn’t been so hard on myself over the years as I tried to figure all this out. 

So where do I go from here? What of the future? I guess that’s a bit of why I took the time to recount this very story. Through self-reflection and intentional exploration, I am opening myself up to discovery. Of note is that I’m including you all in this process. What have you learned? What truths are you willing to share? I hope that exercises such as this, reflecting in detail on formative moments from my youth, at the very least, will produce some golden nuggets that I wouldn’t have found had I not turned over the rocks in the last 3,000 words. 

So there’s the past and the future, but what of the present moment? It’s November 26, 2019, I’m in the Deschutes Public library in Bend, Oregon, looking out east from the second floor row of windows. Its 2:55pm but it’s a dark afternoon and the first real snow of the year is swirling, whipping about, and ultimately blanketing the earth. I try to follow a single flake of snow but in this weather its impossible. I empathize with these particular flakes; they’re having a rough go. This is not that heavy calm snow where each flake falls in slow motion on a direct path to the ground. 

Each snowflake has a story and, like us, it does not get to select its time or place on this planet. There are weather patterns, sporadic winds and underlying currents that do what they will with these little bits of snow. We too have been pushed around and sent off to places we didn’t want to go and to circumstances that we feel like we didn’t choose. As a white speck of crystallized moisture, it’s laughable to think we can affect the greater storm or the forces of the wind. But what we can affect is the attitude with which we fall. We can choose to embrace the wind, we can choose to not fight what’s beyond our control, and we can howl with gratitude for a life of mystery and unpredictability. Or we can white-knuckle it and live in fear that this life might end in a way we hadn’t planned or don’t want.

One of the few things I know for sure is that the decision to bond my flake with three others, Nikki, Dash, and Belen, was a middle-finger to the tempest; one became four and we’re stronger for it. I pray we fall gracefully and bravely and that just maybe our imprint upon impact will be a mark that those above can see and use to spot their landing. 

 

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