I was never an athlete, still am not. I played football and baseball in high school but never played in an official game. I was a bench-warmer. I went out for the team because I liked to play games. I had no idea one had to practice and be in good physical shape. As I got older I realized that I was overweight and inactive. College drinking followed by high pressure jobs made me soggy.
I was living in Los Angeles and decided to drive to Santa Monica beach and run a little to "get in shape". I only lasted about twenty minutes before I realized that it was not a good idea. Being the addictive personality that I am, though, I continued for another forty minutes. An hour just seemed like a good round number. When I got home, showered and rested the soreness began, and got worse the next day. Running and being active really sucked.
I saw runners every day looking like they were enjoying themselves. I didn't become a fund manager at a large money management firm by being lazy so I did my research and found a number of running clubs. A running club did not sound like a barrel of moneys but I joined LA Leggers just to test myself. I always thought I could handle difficult things, maybe running a marathon would help me mentally as well as physically. LA Leggers is a running club that trained people to compete in the Los Angeles marathon. I was very competitive.
At 29 I had a dream job, making over two million dollars per year, some years much higher when we beat our indices. I had a fabulous condo on Ocean Boulevard and needed another challenge, the kind of challenge that a marathon would provide. Stanford business school was highly competitive, as was the field of money management. I got my CFA and got recruited to a large firm doing research for and eventually co-managing a mutual fund.
Saturday mornings were for Leggers and marathon training. Like everything else in my life I threw myself into it like the "A" type personality that I am. The training season began in early August in preparation for the Los Angeles marathon the fist Sunday in March. After my aborted effort to train myself, I thought that the ten minute pace group in Leggers would be the place for me. The first week was one mile along Palisades Park, each week progressively building up (it is not called the marathon build-up for nothing) to twenty six miles two weeks before the big race (tapering for two weeks prior to race day).
Of course, one could not possibly get into marathon shape on a diet of Saturdays alone so I joined Sports Club LA, which is a few feet from my office on Sepulveda Boulevard. Weekdays I would work out after work, as I had to follow the market and be at my desk at 4:30 am. I got to the gym by 4:30 pm, beat the crowd and found good treadmills near a television screens. After the first one-or two-mile runs on Saturdays, I was able to run on the treadmill for five miles in fifty minutes. That meant I was comfortably in the ten minute pace group and that is where I put myself in week two of Leggers workouts. I was not pushing myself and felt I could go faster as I lost weight and strengthened my body.
Working out at LA Sports Connection had its benefits besides great workouts. The women looked great and usually wore fantastic and coordinated leotards or workout attire. The eye candy was great! Still, I was a geek who wore glasses and dated little. I had opportunities, probably because I was successful but was terribly shy around women. I hated being rejected and took few chances. When I did, I was able to develop good relationships.
I met Veronica at the gym. At twenty, she was four years younger than I at the time. We had casual conversations while stretching (which I learned how to do well in the Leggers training) or using weights. We dated. I took her out to dinner six or seven times over the course of the fall and winter. We ended up in my condo one fabulous evening and had a great time. I needed the pleasure of a woman like any other man and that would have been enough for most guys but we talked a lot about dating, relationships, future plans and I realized that she and I had dissimilar goals. I met other women and the married guys at the office always had set-ups for me. There were thousands of women in Los Angeles who would want to be with a guy who had my income, thousands of women. I found a few. I enjoyed myself. I began to improve my bedroom skills. More importantly, I gained self confidence in close correlation with my body image. That first marathon season I went from 230 lbs. to 193 lbs. and toned up nicely. A change of diet helped a lot as well.
Marathon day in March was glorious. Those were the days when the Los Angeles Marathon was a circular course that began and ended in downtown. There were over twenty five thousand runners, thousands of people lining the course, bands along the way, people to chat with and some good eye candy as well. My first marathon took four hours and twenty nine minutes. I was in heaven. I did something I never thought possible. Now, people looked at me differently. I was hooked.
I continued to work out after work at LA Sports Connection and decided to add yoga. I found a yoga studio on Second Street in Santa Monica that had a class that began at 6:30 pm, perfect. I bought a yoga mat. I was terrible, of course. While I thought I was in good shape after two seasons of the build-ups, yoga required entirely different strength. Each one-hour workout was as physically taxing as a ten mile training run. I was drenched with perspiration and tired. And of course, there was plenty of eye candy. Furthermore, the women were a few feet from me. I could smell them when they arrived, all made up and perfumed (many of them were looking for mister right) and sweating and grunting at the end. I went home many nights and beat off.
After I had gotten a little better at the yoga positions, I could relax and look around more. Then when I started, I was able to concentrate and stop falling down and embarrassing myself. That is when I noticed an incredible blonde. I was aroused and arrived early to place my mat near hers. We chatted a few times before I had the fortitude to talk with her. Gail was an artist who designed video games at one of the gaming companies in the area. She was an avid yoga student and knew a few other places but this was her favorite. I finally even got up the nerve to ask her out. I must tell you about her.
It is difficult to see past her incredible good looks. She was tall. I am 6'2" and she was near my eye level. She wore her shoulder-length blonde hair in a single pony tail, which left her neck and shoulders bare. She had a perfect body, perfect tan (from what I could see—arms and back but not her legs which were covered in tights) and an unbelievable ass. She always had color-coordinated yoga outfits that accentuated her face. She was intimidating. She told me she was single and we made a date for lunch on a Sunday. I thought that would be less aggressive than dinner. We talked about yoga, of course, and other workout things, mostly. She was twenty-six, like me, from Central California and studied art at the Art Institute of San Francisco. We dated and even were physical. It is difficult to describe how turned on I was with her body. She taught me some things about giving head and I will be eternally grateful. I never thought we would end up together and when she told me that she wanted to have a chance with an old boyfriend who had moved to LA I understood. From then on, blondes drove me crazy.
I continued to train for the LA Marathon and planned vacations around other marathons. I was getting addicted. The market was having a broad decline which hampered my fund's performance but we were within acceptable boundaries, balancing risk and return. I was able to find a few investments that turned out very well and was promoted to assistant manager of the large fund.
In my second year of training, I ran a few half marathons as a way to work on improving my speed. I decided that breaking a four hour marathon would be my goal.
