It’s a Monday afternoon, and I’m about to go to my BJJ class and then play the first sand volleyball game of our new season. I play in a few coed leagues per year, and this will be a new 4 v 4 league at Grand Sands, which I have never played at before but am excited to get involved there. This past weekend was one that I have been looking forward to for a while. I got to run the Ragnar Michigan – a 194 mile relay with 10 other team mates, including 2 very old friends whom I haven’t seen in a while, and some of their Air Force friends. It was pretty tough, and my 3 legs added up to about 17.5 miles of mostly rolling hills with a few tough climbs added in along our course from Muskegon to Traverse City, Michigan. The course mostly hugged the Lake Michigan shoreline but the middle third featured a lot of cornfields, rain, and a mostly sleepless night. We finished in about 32 hours, and I could not be more proud of our team for powering through.
After the race, we attended an after party by the Lake and most of us stayed the night in Kalamazoo and went out to celebrate our success that night. I thought I would get some flack about choosing not to drink while we were out celebrating, but really no one seemed to notice or care. I was happy about that, and actually that seems to be a recurring theme since I quit the bottle. Nobody cares if I choose not to drink. I keep thinking back to my undergrad days when I would be considered kind of lame and a buzzkill for making that choice, and that is one of the reasons I took so long to pull the trigger on quitting. But nobody so far has cared at all, and many have even have been very supportive of my decision.
This was also the first weekend that I have set foot inside a bar since quitting, which I thought would be a huge temptation, but it wasn’t. Part of the reason was that I was famished and a little dehydrated, so all I wanted to do was chug water and eat some protein/something filling. Although I’m sure I won’t be a frequent bar fly, it’s nice to know I can go hang out at a bar with friends without feeling tempted to drink if that’s what I choose to do. I still feel like my sobriety is a pretty fragile thing, and don’t want to break the cycle even once because I very well could revert back to being a regular drinker again, which would be a huge step backward. I like my new life. Whenever I do feel tempted, I think back to a girl I met several months ago at a social networking event. Pretty much everyone else was tipping back a few beers and trying to fit in. This girl (her name was Casey) was very poised and sociable, and obviously very in shape. I was later told by a mutual friend that she does not drink at all, which struck me most because of all of the people there, she was the most comfortable in her own skin. She is one of the reasons I don’t drink today, because the fact that she did not change herself to try to fit in made everyone like her more.
Alrighty, it’s off to BJJ for me. Till next time.
Zachary
Iron Sharpens Iron 