Pizza is a lot like sex. When its good, its really good. When its bad, its still pretty good.

-Mike Birbiglia

How Pizza Saved My Life

Pizza.  We all know it.  Most of us love it. I am from Chicago, deep-dish capital of the world.  I no longer live in Chicago, but I still consider it my home.  Suffice to say that Chicagoans love their pizza. But despite what type of pie you prefer, this is an article about how pizza can save lives.

Depression.  Just mentioning the word can make you feel like a Johnny Raincloud or Debbie Downer.  Yet it strikes millions.  Not clinical depression, but just that general down in the dumps feeling that strikes us from time to time throughout our lives.  Depression sucks, I think is a universal feeling.

Forgive me for a moment while I spin a little trail of logic that will guide you to the same conclusion I had, in that pizza can save lives.

First off, a little scenery please:

It was the winter of 2008.  It was a cold February day up in the suburbs of Chicago.  There was snow on the ground but it was much too cold to snow that day.  The temps were somewhere around 0F.  The previous week I had tried my luck at testing whether I had the genetic makeup to be an ultra-running superstar.

What I did was map out a 26.2 mile route in my car and run it, starting at 11pm at night.  I had only run about 14 miles previous to this, and had just started running back in September.  I made it in about 3 hours and 40 minutes.  I was stoked.  I felt good.  The next weekend, I decided to tempt fate and go for a 50k, or 31.1 miles.

By mile 30 I had developed what I like to call the death march.  I could no longer hold my hand up, and my arms dangled down by my sides.  I don’t know if you would call what I was doing, running, it was more of a controlled stumble, as I could no longer really control or feel my legs in the sub-zero temperatures.  I was leaning forward, and felt that if I fell down, I wouldn’t have the strength to get up.

Well I made it back home, and I was so excited I hadn’t died out there. I let out a scream of satisfaction, ate a Clif Bar, and went right to bed.  I developed a severe stomach flu the next morning, which sidelined me for days.  I think the all the idiotic amount of running suppressed some immune function.

I tried to run again when I felt better but my IT band really hurt. Imagine a hot knife, jabbing into the outside of your knee.  Not good.  Days went by, then weeks.  I still couldn’t run without pain.  I got to be really depressed.

Enter pizza stage right.  Well, up until this point I had been eating very healthfully.  It is a different mindset when you eat well in order to be in top condition to do what you like, instead of just eating well to lose weight or get healthier.  I stayed healthy to run, not the other way around.  I decided, “Screw it, Im making a pizza, its not like it can affect my running anyway!”  I hadn’t even thought to cheat on my diet up to this point, but I felt like crap, so I didn’t care.

I realized as I sat there and ate my deep-dish pizza with pineapple, olives, onions, green peppers, and sun-dried tomatoes, that I no longer felt like hell.  I felt good.  I felt alive and happy again. Maybe it was just my heart struggling to pump all the fat through my veins, but I was sweaty with giddiness.  What had been a big deal before, doubting whether I would ever run again, no longer seemed as bad.  If I would only stop worrying and just let my leg heal, I could resume running, and be a little less idiotic with my training ideas.

So here is my logic.  Depression is caused by a lack of being able to be made happy by things that should make us happy, like puppies.  Depression, in the worst cases can even lead to suicide because someone cant even be happy with their own life, let alone puppies, so they decide to end it.  No one has ever chosen to die though, to my knowledge, while eating pizza.  Pizza makes us happy.  Therefore, pizza not only makes us happy again, but  can then likewise, through curing depression, save lives.

Who knows what sort of downward spiral I would have gone down if that savoy deep dish gut bomb hadn’t been there to give me a delicious slap of reality.

So thank you pizza, for saving my life!

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 6th, 2010 by Blake at 8:43 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.