By Christopher Cudworth

I once did the math on the number of cigarette butts along a stretch of busy road near my home. It had come to my attention that there were quite a few butts stuck on the roadside between one of the major traffic lights and the entrance to a movie theater ¼ mile up the hill.

So I calculated the number of feet in that quarter mile (5,280 per mile divided by 4 = 1320) and counted the number of cigarette butts in a few different spots along the length of this road. There were literally cigarette butts in every foot of that ¼ mile section of road, and the average turned out to be 16. Not exactly scientific, I know, but my curiosity demanded some mathematics, so you’ll have to bear with me. But I do not think it is an exaggeration to say there were at least 21,120 cigarette butts along that ¼ mile stretch of road.

A concentration of butts

The concentration of butts was exceptional at that little point in the universe, I will grant you that. But the math experiment illustrated the point that there are one helluva number of cigarettes thrown out of car or truck windows by smokers every day. Suffice to say the ashtrays in those cars do not likely see much action. It must be far simpler to litter the roadways than deal with the visible and olfactory consequences of your own smoking habit. That’s a living, breathing tarsnake if one ever existed.

Think for a moment about that word: ashtray. It’s a tray. For your ashes. Basically that is also what smoking does to your lungs. Cigarettes are the ultimate tarsnake of vices, you see.  They provide such pleasure and stimulation to the senses, yet leave deposits of tar, ash, smoke and poisonous additives on your lungs, throat and mouth. We all know what that produces. Cancer. Which among smokers is far more common than the general population.

Cancer sticks

Some basic information listed on About.com sums up just some of the risks of smoking. “Most cases of lung cancer death, close to 90% in men, and 80% in women are caused by cigarette smoking. There are several other forms of cancer attributed to smoking as well, and they include cancer of the oral cavity, pharynx, larynx, esophagus, bladder, stomach, cervix, kidney and pancreas, and acute myeloid leukemia. The list of additives allowed in the manufacture of cigarettes consists of 599 possible ingredients. When burned, cigarette smoke contains over 4000 chemicals, with over 40 of them being known carcinogens.”

The article goes on to document just how much smoking increases your risks of cancer, especially lung cancer, which is an unforgiving form of cancer that often literally chokes you to death. “Compared to nonsmokers, men who smoke are about 23 times more likely to develop lung cancer and women who smoke are about 13 times more likely. Smoking causes about 90% of lung cancer deaths in men and almost 80% in women.”

That’s an awful lot of risk to take on for a filthy habit that also makes you stink, costs thousands of dollars a year to sustain and creates so much waste in terms of cigarette butts, packaging and secondhand smoke, which also causes cancer. So while you’re smoking, you’re also helping to kill the people around you, even your kids.

Fortunately, if you quit smoking, the bad effects start to go away immediately, and your cancer risks are cut way down. Possibly even eliminated. That’s the New School of thinking. The Old School ignored all that.

Old School Smoking

When I first started working at a newspaper in the late 1980s, smoking was still allowed in the newsroom. Which was basically a set of cubicles in the same offices as the sales team and photographers. Writers and editors lit up all the time while working on stories. It is not clear to this day why smoking was so prevalent among journalists. Perhaps they are an anxious crew by nature. All that intense desire to seek the truth. They smoked and they drank. A lot.

Their columns of smoke (I know, what a pun) would rise up and disperse along the ceilings. If you wanted to enter or leave the building, it meant wading through a wall of smoke to get outside. Some of us held our breath. Some women even went the long way around, through the production facility to avoid having to smell like smoke when they headed out for appointments.

No smoking laws

Now that smoking is banned inside buildings all over Illinois, smokers congregate outside for “smoking breaks,” whatever that means. Most stand and shiver or sweat, depending on the season, dodging raindrops or snowflakes or bird droppings depending where the SMOKING zone is situated. They look to be pretty miserable, those smokers.

Except they’re generally nice people. I’ve talked to many of them over the years. They are not mean or snarky or bitter, although they deserve to be in some ways. How would you feel if you were banned from chewing gum indoors? Or taking breath mints? Or farting. What if society banned indoor flatulence? Half the workforce would be running outside every hour to crank off farts in a windstorm. Instead they surreptitiously sneak to the bathroom and let off their dangerous gassers where the collective air of the bathroom stalls serves as a form of collective forgiveness. Just don’t breath that bathroom air. Given what most people eat and drink, it just might be carcinogenic.

Vices everywhere

Smoking is a bad habit just like eating too much. Both are dangerous choices, but one is a known carcinogen while the facts about food and cancer are just too scary to consider. Food provides necessary nutrients for survival, but there is nothing so scary as learning what we’re really eating in this world. Pink slime. Red Dye #Whatever. Preservatives. Farm chemicals. Pesticides. Bovine Growth Hormone. Herbicides. Even residual psychotropic drugs in our water and food supply, and arsenic in our apple juice? Maybe the smokers have it right. At least they know what they’re getting. The bulk of the world (another pun!) eats at McDonalds and thinks nothing of it.

Smoking kills

Still, there’s no real excuse for smoking unless you are perhaps a soldier in a really threatening war zone. Then you are forgiven for smoking cigarettes. Because if you choose to risk your life for your country or were drafted into war and don’t really want to be there at all, you deserve to do anything you bloody well please to quell your nerves and pass the time.

The armed forces has distributed plenty of smokes over the years, and some (but not all, we know…) of those nicotine addicts come back home from wars and can’t lick the habit of smoking.

So for quite a few years (from 1945 to about February 23, 1968 I think it was, when the Marlboro man accidentally coughed up a lung while riding his horse on TV) we romanticized smoking instead, until it became too evident that smoking really was killing us. Then we started a war on smoking. Funny how it all works.

The losing war on smoking

Despite our declared war on smoking there are millions of new smokers who start every year. According to the website Creators.com (a syndicate of talent, they say) an average of 3000 new smokers starts up the habit each day. That’s 1,095,000 new smokers every year. That’s over a million newly dumbed down people.

Why do we call smokers dumb? Because of this statistic from the Centers for Disease Control website:  “More deaths are caused each year by tobacco use than by all deaths from human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), illegal drug use, alcohol use, motor vehicle injuries, suicides, and murders combined.” Holy shit. I didn’t know that.

The cognitive dissonance of smoking

Yet I’ve met so many smokers who are absolutely brilliant people. See, there’s this cognitive dissonance to smoking. We wonder why smart people smoke. Then we see the dimension of this dissonance when people finally quit and become anti-smoking zealots. We must sympathize, empathize, whatever. But we should not look down on smokers. I really don’t. Because as we’ll see, we runners and riders have a few more things in common with the smoking set than we might care to admit. Which brings us to…

Sexy cigarettes

We used to think smoking was damned sexy. Didn’t we? Movie stars. Famous people. People with money, who gambled well, drank expensive scotch and got laid a lot. Those were the people who smoked.

It must be the packaging,

Sexy packaging sells more cigarettes.

The packaging of cigarettes is obviously somehow sexed up. When you’re out running or riding and pass by a cigarette package on the ground, it is striking how beautiful and simple some of that packaging really is. Recently I was running home and found an empty package of Marlboro Black Bold Menthol Flavor cigarettes. That package was so bold and wanton lying there on the wet road it was literally like a box of sex on the street. “Why don’t we do it in the road?” that package seemed to sing. So I can see how people might start smoking just for the pleasure of handling all that sexy packaging.

If she smokes…

I once dated a woman who smoked, but usually only when she drank. Or smoked pot. Which was also fun. That meant most of the terrific sex we shared was tinted with the smell and taste of menthol cigarettes and alcohol of one form or another. She smoked Kool cigarettes. And she was cool. I’m speaking in the aggregate here.

I can remember her tapping the package on her wrist in that way smokers do. Just the other day I saw another guy do that with the  cigarettes he’d just purchased at a gas station. That tapping makes a strangely sensual whackwhackwhackwhackwhack as he thumped the package first on his wrist, then on his thigh. I wondered if it was some sort of smoker mating call. At any rate, I refused to answer.

Yet I actually wondered, what does that whacking do? I never asked the girl with the good sex, nor did I dare ask the brazen man whacking his cigarette pack in public. I’m rather surprised no one has made a law against that.

Role models and iModels

Although it is less common, we still do see people smoking in the movies. Some say that is one of the reasons why kids start up smoking. Role models. Cigarette advertising.

I say bullshit. Kids start smoking because deep inside most of us have a dark little death wish and a desire to be entertained at any cost. We’re deathly afraid of not being entertained or stimulated, and the excess emotional, physical and sexual energy coursing through our bodies needs a fix of some sort.

Fortunately smartphones have come along to wick away some of our nervous tension. Think about it: every time you watch a person text or check their smartphone think of them as a cigarette smoker. Perhaps what we really need is an app that emits smoke out of the phone. Don’t laugh, it could work. There are already electronic cigarettes that do the same thing. The Apple iSmoke is just around the corner, it seems.

Seeking release

Let’s admit it publicly: our deepest anxieties need some sort of release, and we need it now. But rather than engaging in a permanent game of hard-wired, evolutionary “fight or flight” where our minds and bodies are in constant conflict over what to do with ourselves, smoking steps up and says, “I’m going to stay right here and light up. I may be a nervous evolutionary wreck, but this little cigarette is going to bridge the gap between fight or flight.”

Don’t worry, we’re getting to the running and riding part. I promise.

The history of smoking in four seconds

Sucking on a stick lit with flame on one end is an exotic response to the human anxiety that has tendered the nerves of societies around the world for millennia. The aboriginal peace pipe. The dope smoker in his dorm room. The brilliant surgeon who can save your life with a scalpel, then goes outside between cutting up patients to suck on a cigarette.

We’re all in denial of the dangers life throws out way. Even when we hold the lives of others in our very hands. Especially then. Some humans just need a smoke. Or something. Which is why so many used to smoke after sex. The “little death” some philosophers call it.

Beating the odds one way or the other

As runners and riders we mimic the odds and dangers of smoking in a number of ways. Some do so blatantly. Running in the same direction as traffic, or riding our bikes against it. Thrillseekers and cyclists sick of road rules dive out into traffic and flaunt the law. You know it’s true. We’ve all run a few stop signs, cut across traffic at high speed, run through dangerous neighborhoods at high speed. It all happens before you know it. Fight or flight.

To raise the stakes, we could all put on a blindfold and just ride by sound, or wear sunglasses at night as we run down roads with no streetlights, just to prove we can do it. That’s the same thing as smoking, you see. Dare yourself to dive through the funnel of odds and desperation.

Fork in the road

I’ve said a few times in life that if I hadn’t become a runner or cyclist I’d have to find some other vice to occupy my brain. I recall the feeling after the first cross country practice in high school. I was a freshman and had never run more than a mile or two consecutively in my life, not even in middle school track. Yet my body was truly wired for running with a thin frame and an anxious mind that loves to be propelled through space as fast as it can go. When that first practice was finished I was exhausted.  But happy. It was literally like a drug, running. I could not get enough. So I’ve run and run and run ever since. Because I have to. Want to. Need to. Now I ride too. We Run and Ride. Welcome to the club.

It’s a fine line, hate to see it go…

There have been a few runners I’ve known, some of them world class in fact, that have actually quit the sport and taken up smoking. One was a friend and high school teammate who turned out to be a 4:01 miler in college. He studied fire science and later became a fire chief as well as a chain smoker. Perhaps in his case it was destiny to become a smoker. It’s a fine line, you hate to see it go. Its his choice, not mine. Perhaps his highly athletic body will keep him from getting cancer somehow.

A very few people I’ve known were both runners and smokers at the same time. It was always strange to watch them finish a run and then light up a cigarette. It made me strangely envious, having two intense habits like that.

Smoking and cycling? 

I’ve not been cycling long enough to meet someone who smokes cigarettes and rides with any consistency. Surely a few of them exist. Yet it seems that most serious cyclists are converts of some sort from some other old habit. Too much weight. Divorced. Former sex addicts. Converted runners. People with bad knees, hips or brains. We’re all rolling around on damaged goods, it seems, pedaling like a pack of freaking madmen on roads marked by tarsnakes, potholes and glass. It’s like a scene from a Hunter S. Thompson novel. Who, by the way, was a noted smoker. The picture really does fit together somehow. Fear And Loathing On the Journey of Life.

Tarsnakes and lung power

A tarsnake meets some tar sticks. Convergent evolution?

There’s a real connection, you see, between the tar in cigarettes and the tarsnakes we traverse on the roads. It is literally the same substance smokers are sucking into their lungs. So it seems that tarsnakes creep into our lives one way or the other.

We face our worldly conflicts with both trepidation and denial. Then some of us snuff out the butt, flick it out the window and leave it for someone else to worry about. There be roads to travel, says the pirate smoker in his ’89 Dodge Neon or his 2012 Infiniti. Ash trays must be keep clean, like a good luck charm at a gambling casino, because the goal for all of us is to beat the odds somehow. We’re all dodging tarsnakes one way or the other.

We think ourselves unique just because some vices make us healthy and others turn out to kill us. But the convergent evolution between smoking and exercising has a strange vanishing point. Cigarettes help you lose weight after all, and calm the nerves. Same as cycling. Same as running.

We’re all cruising around trying to get our sexy little packages on. Some of us glimmer. Others shine. Some wind up in the ditch with the other butts, ciggie type and otherwise. Some of us just like to get there with a little less coughing, hacking and overall bodily decay. That’s why we run and ride. See you on the side of the road.