There have been many times, I
have to admit to myself, over the past five decades when I say to myself, How
about easing up on this running thing. In fact, the two most typical questions
I’m asked during social occasions are:
“You still use a flip phone?” (This
usually with a degree of scoffing disbelief)
and
“Are you still running?”
It would be fair to say that
often I’ve used this blog to answer those questions – for myself, but also in
terms of what it may say about the research and thinking in these
areas in the hope readers will benefit from what I’ve written here as they seek
answers for similar questions in their own lives.
Which brings me back to Running
for Your Life. As in easing up on that.
Well, something happened
recently that has finally put the question to rest. I will, as long as I am
able, be running for my life. Now I have pretty clear evidence that that choice
has saved mine.
I won’t go into all the why’s,
the therefores, the subplots. It’s enough just to say this:
As regular readers of this blog
know, I began running for therapeutic reasons. When I was 20 years old I had a
near-death experience due to a blood-clotting horror. When I left hospital a
shadow of my former self in 1976, I promised myself that I would get back to
where I was before I’d been felled by a freak condition for someone as young as
I was at the time.
I started by walking (referring
to myself as “Gunsmoke” Chester, because my damaged leg moved like a wooden
one), then jogging. Before the end of that year I was running every other day (daily
and the leg-swell was too bothersome) and taking blood-thinners.
And so
I have done. Faithfully running every other day for 41 years, through five
decades. (For a long time I did stop the blood-thinners, but resumed taking
them in 2001 (Subplot 1).
Fast forward to Saturday, March
18. I learned much to my considerable dismay that I’d been accidentally
overdosing on my blood-thinners (Subplot 2). So much so that I was in real danger
of internal bleeding (NOT good for the brain). In a Brooklyn emergency ward,
doctors flocked to me. One kind doctor told me the health of my heart, my liver
and kidney were extraordinary. Off the charts, he said. He didn’t say so, but
he didn’t need to. The health of my organs saved my life.
And that can be traced back to
running. I’m not an expert, but I firmly believe that.
So, yeah, here I go again.
Running for Your Life.
Next: Running for Your Life: A Word About Knees
