I am an addict, but it’s not my fault, its Carlos’s fault. Addictions come in two flavors: Good and not-so-good. Running is a good one. My obsessive-compulsive behavior began after watching 37-year-old Carlos Lopes, win the 1984 Olympic Marathon. To win the marathon at that age is certainly inspiring, but the rest of his story is even more motivating. Mimicking a Blue Heeler chasing a feed truck, Carlos was on a training run the week before the Olympics when he was run over by a car. He wasn’t expected to recover enough to even travel, much less win the gold. Watching him, I decided to be a runner.

My first step to be a running junkie began Monday, August 13th 1984. I laced up my running shoes (formerly called tennis shoes) and sprinted down the street. Unfortunately, real life is never quite as rosy it’s portrayed on television and the next two miles were 30 minutes of pure hell. My second day as a runner was worse than the first and I questioned why I watched the Olympics in the first place. Day three I showed the first brilliant spark of improvement by trimming a full five minutes off my two-mile time…by taking a shortcut. After 27 years, I am just like Carlos—I am a runner.

On March 7th, in the pre-dawn darkness in Helena, my running days were seriously crippled in a crash on the icy sidewalk. After a short ambulance ride to the hospital, the ER doctor quietly studied the x-rays of my fractured fibula and dislocated ankle, before announcing it could be a year before I could run again. Five days later while prepping me for surgery, the orthopedic surgeon removed my splint, studied my bruised, blistered and swollen leg before stating, “If you were a diabetic, you would lose this leg. Let’s postpone surgery a couple weeks.”

I nodded, but I quietly thought, “Carlos was run over chasing cars in Portugal and he won the Olympic Marathon the following week. I’m not going to let one little broken leg stop me.” Fourteen days later I was in surgery and as Dr. Martin tightened the last screw on my new bone plate I asked, “You’ve probably never repaired a fracture on a Black Lab, have you?” He shook his head no. “Labs are orthopedic patients from hell because they will chase rabbits the day after surgery and can eat through a thirty day splint in two days,” I explained. “I probably will be more like a Lab than you can imagine.” Dr. Martin chuckled, but said nothing as he tightly cinched the Velcro splint boot over my incision.

Three weeks after surgery, in true retriever form, I stripped off my Velcro boot and handcrafted a running splint from a volleyball ankle brace, ace bandages and electrical tape. (I couldn’t find any duct tape.) It was 50 degrees on a sunny afternoon when I hobbled into the street for my first run. The inflexibility of my custom running apparatus made my stride clumsy and awkward. With a gait resembling a one legged, triple-jumper, I zoomed past the Capital High School track where all the young athletes were practicing. Silence swept the gathering as I crow-hopped along the sidewalk. More curious than inspired, a blonde girl leaned into the chain-link fence and asked, “Are you okay?”

“For today, this is as good as it gets,” I shot back. Although I wasn’t moving fast enough to feel the breeze in my hair, in my mind I was a Labrador chasing a rabbit. Over this past week, I’ve done several three-milers and I must be improving because complete strangers no longer ask if I’m okay. Running is a good addiction because it benefits or harms me and only me. This brings me to my second point: Not-so-good addictions.

Montanans are hopelessly addicted to federal dollars. Of the $10.2 billion we spent over the 2011 biennial budget, $4.9 billon came from the federal government—obviously with strings attached. Every 3.26 million federal dollars gifted to the Treasure State comes complete with one gray wolf. Montanans, our wildlife and livestock, may not want the wolves, but we are hopelessly addicted to federal dollars, so like a battered spouse, we take the good with the bad.

The final stumbling block in last week’s budget negotiations between the Montana Legislature and our governor is 100 million more “free” federal dollars. The budget committees initially refused to expand the programs fed by these funds, but in the end they capitulated, so government grows. Our governor will be portrayed as the champion of the poor for accepting these addictive dollars, while the legislature will be tarnished as misers attempting to balance the budget on the backs of the poverty class. The truth is found in the numbers.

Our nation is now $14.3 trillion in the red and getting $1.5 trillion redder every year. Montana’s addicting acceptance of 100 million dollars for its one million residents, would add 30 billion dollars annually to our national debt if this spending continued proportionally nationwide. It is not free money. Americans are so addicted to federal spending we refuse to see it is destroying us and this makes me bang my head on the table. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go for a run.