About
three years ago, it
became
very obvious to me that I
was getting old....
Climbing the stairs from
the basement of our house wasn’t
without more effort than it had been in previous years. Getting up
from the Lazy Boy after sitting for an hour or two would cause bones
to creak that never seemed to be a problem before. Standing for
longer than a few minutes necessitated leaning up against a wall or
whatever was handy (such as, if I was in a queue of a checkout line,
a shopping cart).
At
about this time, our middle child,
Anton, suggested that I get back into
running. Well, I knew that wasn’t happening. While I was able to
do five miles (not fast) without much of a problem in my late
twenties and, maybe, even into my early thirties, an attempt a few
years earlier showed me that what I had once taken for granted –
the ability to run 10-minute
miles for 10k or more – was gone: I went out one day and managed to
jog all of 40 or 50 yards; my legs felt heavy or like they had no
strength, I’m not sure which, but, without a doubt, they weren’t
capable of doing more than walking.
I’m
not sure why, but I decided to start walking. I suppose I figured I
could at least do that much and, maybe, it would help to forestall
the day when I would be taking drugs for diabetes, high blood
pressure, or whatever other disease old-age had in store for me.
Well, I soon wondered if exercise was worse than being sedentary: a
two-mile walk caused me a fair amount of pain, especially after
sitting for a while. I knew, of course, that some exercise was
better than none, but I figured this “walk and feel the pain bit”
would be just the way it would be until I died or quit exercising,
whichever came first.
Somewhere
in the first couple of months of this, I decided it wasn’t worth
the effort or I just got lazy or whatever. As luck would have it,
the spouse and I
were hanging out one day with Anton and he asked me how the exercise was going. I told him that I had
decided not to mess with it anymore. I don’t remember exactly
what he said in response, but, basically, I got a verbal smack-down
for “falling off the wagon,” so to speak. Being berated by one’s
child, especially when the child is right, is pretty tough to take –
at least, it’s hard when you’ve got an ego like mine. So, that
got me started again.
When
I got up to five miles of trying to walk fairly fast – 15-minute
miles or so – Anton thought I was ready to start running. I
thought he was nuts, but decided it couldn’t hurt to run at Moon
Lake - a
former airport not far from our house
which was converted a few years ago into
soccer fields, complete with a walking path. Moon
Lake was fairly secluded (so the fear of
looking ridiculous was mitigated) and the old runway presented a nice
flat stretch that I thought might be easy enough. On a visit to the
house, Anton gave me a few “core conditioning” exercises –
planks, bird dogs, crunches, and flutter kicks – which I could
barely perform, but did them somewhat faithfully because he promised
it would help.
I’m
not sure how long I would have kept at this had the
youngest child, Hanna, not decided to
help out because my first attempts at running were unmitigated
disasters: I would manage all of about 30 seconds or so of a jog
before the lungs would give out (I'm
sure that was karma catching up with me for decades of an “on
again, off again” – mostly, “on” – habit of smoking).
Hanna accompanied me on many of these early attempts and suggested
that she would keep track of how long I ran and rested, charting how
much longer the former became while, hopefully, the latter became
shorter. In those early days, I remember her saying things like,
“Way to go, Dad! You made it to 50
seconds that time.”
After
I couple of months of this, we finally made it to a whole mile
without stopping. I thought I had finally accomplished something,
but knew that a mile wasn’t enough and looked for a course that I
could do from the house.
I
charted a two-mile route that started and ended at the our driveway.
It took the rest of the summer to gradually lengthen each run until I
was up to two miles, but, even then, the effort was considerable. I
still remember how crossing an intersection (I mostly ran on
sidewalks) would provide such a relief because of the “downhill”
portion the crown of the road which was reached at each mid-point.
In
those days, going out for a run was a bit of a scary thing (it’s
still not without a bit of worry, but nothing like it was then). I
would sit and meditate, sometimes for an hour, before venturing out.
During these meditations, I would mentally map each leg of the route,
coaching myself about how I would actually accomplish the deed.
Oddly
enough, I noticed that, despite the strain of running, I started to
feel better. I could actually stand for longer than ten minutes
without needing to lean up against something and I could actually
feel my breathing in ways that seemed reminiscent of my younger days.
We’re
now about a month shy
of the second anniversary of the “first mile” and I’m able to
run as much as six miles
without stopping. I’m almost to the point where I feel like going
out on a
run is something I can do with a fair amount of confidence; I’m
(almost) completely without worry that I won’t be able to go out
and return unscathed, without an injury or the indignity of being
forced to walk marring the effort. Most incredible of all, I am
continuing to feel better all the time. In my normal daily routine,
I feel stronger, walk straighter, and, while the muscles are still
stiff occasionally after sitting for a bit, coming up the basement
stairs is a piece of cake.
Can
feeling increasingly better continue indefinitely? I have to wonder.
Yesterday, the kids and I ran a 10K in
Eau Claire which,
I think, was
a milestone marking this
running bit becoming
an engrained part of what I do on a regular basis – a part of who I
am as much as being sedentary was until
just a few years ago.
I'm
posting this anecdote because, while I know everyone else's story about
attempting to make a life-change would be
different from mine, I think there are
two or three common
elements (for example, having someone close provide the right amount
of “tough love” or “encouragement bordering
on doting” at just the right times to
keep the whole thing from falling apart) that it could well be of
benefit to others who are contemplating the same thing or
are in those first few terrible months of making the attempt.
Then, too, there are probably
those who have “been there, done that,” but “fell off the
wagon” and forgot what the whole experience had been like. Maybe
my anecdote will jog a few memories (walking or running those
memories would probably work as well) that will set the whole process
in motion again.
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