There are many places to begin a story. Ask someone how they would begin to tell theirs, and, nine times out of ten, they would say, “I was born …” The story of my life as a runner and how running saved – is saving – my life starts, instead, when I took my first steps from hospital. That was many years and thousands of miles ago. In that time and over those long distances, I have learned some important lessons that I’d like to share in my new blog, “Running For Your Life: Healing, Health and Travel on the Open Road.”
“Running For Your Life” is, as advertised, a personal tale. It is also an inspirational guide to a fuller and healthier life. And for marathoners, and would-be marathoners, the blog will be a place to discuss training concerns and questions. I have recently returned to marathon running. In May, with a personal best time of 3:47:42, I placed 35th among 757 men runners in the 50-54 age category of the Pittsburgh Marathon.
I am now training for the Steamtown Marathon in Scranton, Pa., in October, with the view that in my new category (I turn 55 years old five days before the race) I will be able to trim 2:42 from that time in order to qualify for the Boston Marathon in April 2011. If all goes well, in my blog posts through April, I will not only write about the lessons of a life enriched by running, but one that will include training tips and helpful suggestions in my race toward Boston, the crowning glory for runners everywhere.
As a memoirist and novelist, I am drawn to the personal, to what motivates behavior. Since leaving hospital, I’ve tried to live a life balanced on the three “Rs”: Running, Reading and (W)Riting. I am not one given to preaching – I usually find the prescriptions in self-help books to be a clumsy exercise in restating the tenets of common sense. As a runner, reader and writer, I am quite comfortable in my own skin, don’t feel the pull of the podium, bright lights, for people to know my name. Rather, after being encouraged to do so by family and friends, I have come to believe that the lessons I have learned on the road could help other people help themselves.
So how would I start? I close my eyes and it’s the sounds that come back to me. Beep, beep, beep. Whoosh, a pouring liquid. I sense a nurse. Her hands by my head. Adjusting the IV, turning a dial, allowing less fluid to drip through, then more, pressing a needle into the rubber nub of the plastic bladder filling with blood thinners that turn my blood the color of a daughter’s frosting. Rose, the mystery of identity. To hell with that. At least now I can breathe a little. Not without a wracking pain in my chest. But I’m alive.
I’m a few months short of 21 and very sick. It’s odd as we age, think back through time and write about our experiences. If we live long enough, we actually take on many identities. In my first memoir, “Tip of the Iceberg,” I recalled a family secret as I thought and wrote about my father’s flooding of the backyard rink. “I came to believe that the flooder of the rink was not my father,” I wrote. “The man who spread water every night when the weather turned cold became Lord Dufferin, a gray eminence, the namesake of my public school. Sometimes, an old-time hockey player, a Bruin, a Blackhawk. At others an Eskimo, a man of the north.”
As a young man though, my dreams were being cut short. My blog will talk of those days in greater detail, but suffice to say here, I contracted two very painful blood clots – one in my groin, the other in my left leg – and afterward, a pulmonary embolism that very nearly killed me. When I left hospital in a wheelchair, I weighed barely one hundred pounds. My left leg was three times the size of my right, and felt more like a stump than a leg.
In December of 1975, I was an avid sportsman: in ice hockey, baseball and tennis. That March, though, I was literally a stick man: my clothes just hanging off me. When I went back to college in Ottawa to finish my semester, some of my classmates didn’t recognize me. I couldn’t take a step without terrible pain, much less step onto a tennis court.
A word of caution: “Running For Your Life” is not a prescription. I am not a doctor. Far from it. A few years after falling sick, I read “The Complete Book on Running,” a doctor’s best seller. Jim Fixx was his name. In the public mind, Fixx famously ran to an early death and in so doing planted a flag for all those who would say that running for your life will not end well. In many ways, “Running For Your Life” is my testament to how wrong those early critics were about the healing and health benefits of being an avid runner.
So, for a doctor’s point of view, go elsewhere. After all, I was a mere boy when – under doctor’s and hospital care – I got sicker and sicker. It wasn’t a doctor who told me to take up running. When I left hospital in Ottawa all those years ago, I felt like nothing more than subject matter for the advancement of geriatric ailments in a perfectly healthy – even athletic – young man. I don’t remember much about those awful days, except that I was many times surrounded by medical students and once told that my rapid decline was quite rare. Usually people in their 70s, 80s, and 90s, would blood-clot as I did – and then die right away or, later, after a few weeks or perhaps months as a bed-sit invalid. Then the student scratched at a clipboard and went on. For reasons that I won’t go into here, for most of that time, I was alone in the hospital. Alone to make up my mind that if I ever got out alive I would never be in hospital again. Instead, I would listen to my body; I would trust myself. I would run for my life. Or as ultramarathoner Scott Jurek says, “You never know how strong you are until being strong is your only choice.”
In these posts, that will include such topic areas as “Getting Started,” “Motivation,” and “Running Without Headphones,” I will discuss mechanics of running as well as my personal philosophy of running and healing. I also have done research in areas that deserve a wider understanding. The research shows that, if done in a sensible way, running can be a part of people’s lives, not just in their youth, their pre-family years, but throughout their whole lives. “Running For Your Life” is not your typical marathon training blog. I would like to think there will be something here for my fellow marathoners, and for those who are contemplating beginning to train for one. Rather, though, it’s young people in hospital, those in need of a little inspiration, who I have in mind as I start this blog. I know just what they are thinking. I hope they find this and get something out of it.
Next: Getting Started: Part One
