When I was a boy, I lived, as James Joyce famously said, “a short distance from my body.” I had a body, of course, I just didn’t live in it much. Mostly, I lived in my mind, and (through books) in the minds of other people.
I lived in Middle Earth and Narnia. I lived in the Forgotten Realms and in a galaxy far, far away. And I lived in worlds of my own devising.
Most nights, for example, as I fell asleep, I would imagine that I was kidnapped by a band of wild forest-dwellers who would blindfold me and carry me by canoe to the deepest, most untouched parts of the forest. They would give me my own bark hut and explain that they needed someone just like me to carry on their traditions and protect the heart of the woods. They would teach me to stalk and track and sense the hidden rhythm of the forest. And I would fall in love with a beautiful maiden there.
I did visit my body occasionally. In the pool, I would dunk under water and let out a slow breath until I sank to the bottom to feel all that water press down on me. Sometimes I would coast down the hill on my bike and feel like I was flying. But these visits were short. And in the end, I would return to my books, my notebooks, and my thoughts.
My parents were wonderfully supportive of my bookishness, but they also worried about it. My mother would cast me outside saying, “you can’t spend your whole summer reading on the couch.” And when my father found me daydreaming alone in the woods at the outskirts of a family picnic, he’d enlist me in a game of horseshoes or volleyball. They were trying to do what was best for me, so they signed me up for little league and summer camp and the other physical things that boys my age were supposed to do.
Maybe they wondered why I was so strangely disembodied. But of course, I didn’t know. I was just the way I was, and if it had something to do with my upbringing or my diet or the arrangement of stars and planets at my birth … well, I didn’t know what it was.
Looking back now, I suspect that it might not have inhabited my body much because it was so disappointing. I was what you’d call a late bloomer. From kindergarten through sophomore year, I was either the shortest kid in my class or a close contender for it. I was so thin that my mother consulted our doctor about it. And by the time I got to middle school, gym class became a kind of torture. The other boys made relentless fun of my speed, my size, my lack of coordination. Guys on the opposing theme would pass me the ball just to show their friends how easily they could take it back. If I tried earnestly, they would intentionally leave me in the dust. If I didn’t, they would taunt me by holding the ball just beyond my reach.
However much delayed, I did eventually grow up. I went to college in the perfect place for a guy who loved adventures of the mind. But I could not live in fantasies forever. As graduation crept ever closer, more and more people asked me what kind of job I was going to get, how was I going to support myself, and what I was going to Do? In their voices you could hear it had a capital D.
Somehow, dreamer that I was, I managed. I got jobs and did things and supported myself. I visited my body when I needed to, but I never really moved in. That’s when this story really begins. And like most stories in my life it began with a trip to the library.
It was there, one day when I was about 30 that I found a book that must have been written just exactly for me. It was a story about how deep in the canyonlands of northern Mexico lived a people who grew corn in the desert, who lived close to the land, and who had a near-magical superpower. But their superpower wasn’t stalking or tracking. Their superpower was that they could run a hundred miles straight under the desert sun with nothing but a pair of thin huarache sandals. Here was an adventure that tapped right into all my deepest wishes. But for all its fantastical elements, the story was true. These people were real. And they really did run and run and run. I took it home and read it in one gulp.
The mythical canyon runners of Mexico were everything I hoped for, but there was more to this book than just them. It was a book about incredible running traditions all over the world. Even the indigenous people of the land where I live sent their young hunters to run down a deer as a rite of passage.
But it wasn’t just hunters who lived in the last tucked-away wild corners of the world who could run this way. It was all of us. Did you know that over distances of a hundred miles or more, humans can outrace horses!? Do you know that? Because I didn’t. And the knowledge broke open all kinds of dreams in my heart. Did you know that among all of the incredible endurance runners of the animal kingdom, we humans are among the greatest? In fact, one of the leading hypotheses about why human bodies are the way they are–our hairlessness, our sweaty skin, our long stilt-like legs–is the idea our ancient ancestors as they ran down antelope on the dry grasslands of east Africa. We all come from a heritage of superpower endurance. We evolved to run. We were born for it. It is a birthright that we have carried in our muscles for millions of years. Your body, even if you never run farther than your mailbox, is one of nature’s greatest running machines.
I was transfixed by this story and what it meant. Even in a world that was stubbornly unlike my fantasies, here was a chance to touch them in real life. Here was a chance to live in the magic of the wild forest-dwellers of my childhood dreams.
Nearly as soon as he’d finished that book, having run little more in my life than the mile-long, gym-class fitness test, I signed up for a marathon.
I didn’t want to run the race you might see in a sneaker commercial. I didn’t want to run like an athlete. I wanted to run like my ancestors, like the cave-man I’d always hoped to be. So I bought the flimsiest, most sandal-like shoes I could find. For a while I even ran in a pair of homemade huaraches.
Not knowing anything about how to train or run, I found a rudimentary training calendar and spent long evenings mapping out running routes, and long, hot afternoons trying to finish them.
When my runs got so long that I started getting dehydrated, I began packing water. When I got hyponatremia from losing electrolytes, I tried homemade energy drinks. And when they were so gross that I almost vomited from drinking them, I began packing Gatorade, even though it wasn’t a very cave-man-like thing to do.
Running was hard, but not for the reasons that I had suspected. I didn’t mind sweating or breathing hard or being out under the summer sun. But running up the long, steep hills, I found that my legs weren’t all that strong. And running down the long steep slopes on the other side, I found that I wasn’t very coordinated.
But as the weeks went by, my body changed before my eyes. My legs got stronger. My stride got smoother. I got ravenously hungry. And every week, I ran farther than I had before–twelve miles, then sixteen, then twenty. And then something strange began to happen. I, who had lived my whole life a short distance from my body, began to live in it for hours on end.
I didn’t listen to music. I didn’t daydream. I just felt the smooth rhythm of my feet, the muscles of my arms swinging, the tiny compensating twists in my torso, and the fire in my thighs when I pushed up steep hills.
For the first time in my life I felt strong.
On the day of the marathon, I got on a bus, rode from the finish line across two towns and began to realize just how long a marathon really was. Twenty-six point two miles. That would be like running from one end of Manhattan to the other and back! It would be like running all the way across the Great Salt Lake or the entire perimeter of Nantucket. I couldn’t tell if the twinges in my stomach were excitement or intimidation. When I queued up in the back of about 400 others, I looked around at the folks around. Many were young, but there were also older people with silvered hair. Many were trim, but there were men there with soft bellies and round cheeks. Many look cool in their sunglasses and brand name shorts and shoes. But there were plenty who were there running in tattered T-shirts from races of years past. One guy was even running the race barefoot to the disbelief of many of the people around him.
All of these people were strangers, but somehow I felt a certain kinship with them. I had trained like they did. I knew how fast some of them would have to run to qualify for the Boston marathon and how to baby powder my armpits to prevent chafing. All that training hadn’t made me a magical forest cave man, but it had made me a runner.
And then the horn sounded and the people cheered and I began to run, surrounded by runners on every side.
Four hours and nineteen minutes later, I crossed the finish line.
Maybe the elite runners who pull out far ahead of their competitors run alone. But not me. I was surrounded by other people. I met a girl whose goal was to run in 50 marathons, one in every state, and had a T-shirt with about a third of their postal codes crossed off. I met a couple who had just retired and were excited to have more time to run. I met people who were running to raise money for causes, people who were running for their health, and people who were running for themselves.
What was I running for? I wasn’t really sure. But I felt amazing.
At mile seventeen, a friend saw me from the crowd and stuffed a bag of gummy bears into my shirt pocket. Then, at mile 20 I hit the wall. My calves seized. and it felt like I was running with concrete shoes. At mile 22, there was a hill that I wasn’t sure I would ever see the top of. But the people in the houses along that stretch of road cheered and shouted as I came around the corner and blasted “Sweet Caroline.” I think I made it to the top just so I wouldn’t let them down. At mile 25, despite a painfully throbbing left knee, I knew I would finish. The last quarter mile of the course was lined with exuberant onlookers. I could hear the announcer at the finish like calling numbers. At twenty-six point two, they took my picture. There were tears mixed in with the sweat on my cheeks. And a look of both anguish and triumph on my face. Some racers say, “It’s not really a marathon if you don’t finish in under four hours.” They put a medal around my neck anyway. And the people I loved most in the world threw their arms around me and told me how proud they were.
It’s kind of odd to say it, but I’ve forgotten most of the things in my life. All of those dinners and drives to work and times my favorite songs came onto the radio are lost. Maybe that’s just the way most days are. But more than a decade later, the feeling of crossing that finish line is still vivid–both the pain and the triumph. I had hardly limped off of the field before I was planning my next race.
If you’d asked me shortly after I’d finished that race whether it had changed me, I’d have struggled to answer. I knew that it had, but it was hard to say how. Of course, I was faster and stronger than I’d been before. And there was the instant kinship I felt with any stranger sweating down the road. But it would take me a long time to recognize the subtler in how I felt in and about my body. That scrawny kid who had felt nothing but shame and hurt in middle school gym had grown into someone who felt pride and delight in his arms and legs. What a travesty that I had felt ashamed of for what my body wasn’t or guilty for not “doing better” by it. It was beautiful. And it was mine. Look at what it could do and how good it felt to do them. Even when it was hard. Especially when it was hard. Pushing the boundaries of what my body was capable of, brought me to it, finally, as my home. .
Instead of eschewing athletes and athletics, I began to seek them out, to look for new races, new challenges, new ways to test what my body could do. I’d run any race, no matter the length. I learned just where to place myself in the starting queue for my pace. It turned out I was good at climbing hills. I discovered when to save my energy and when to open my stride. I could watch other runners and give a reasonable guess at their pace. I carved nearly an hour off of my marathon time, and I even won a few small races.
Running had become part of me, a regular part of every week. But it wasn’t just running. Running had opened the door to all kinds of remarkable adventures. It could paddle and ride and swim and climb. It could lift heavy things. At some point, I forgot that I was the kid who had hated athletics. Instead, I’d gotten used to being one of the fastest, strongest, most ambitious people I knew. I didn’t really know why. I was just a runner. I was the way I was, and if it had something to do with my upbringing or my training or the arrangement of stars and planets at my birth … well, I’d forgotten what it was.
Until it all abruptly stopped.
One gray late-winter day, I took my kids to a trampoline park. For an hour, they bounced and leaped and somersaulted, and I bounced and leaped right along with them. There was nothing remarkable about the bounce that changed everything. I’d been doing things just like it all afternoon. One moment I was in the air, the next I was on the trampoline. Just like always. Except that I immediately knew that something was wrong. There was pain in my left leg, starting at my hip and wrapping all the way down to my heel. I limped to a chair in the lobby.
At first, I thought it would heal just like every other pulled muscle and strained joint he’d ever had. But as the days went by, it only got worse. It was hard to sit, to stand, to walk. Eventually, it got so bad I couldn’t sleep. So, I went to a doctor. She told me that my injury wasn’t in my leg or hip at all. It was in my back. I had, as they say, slipped a disc. The jelly-like cushioning between one vertebrae and another had squeezed out of its proper place and was now pressing on the nerve that ran down my leg.
“Will it heal?” I asked.
“Most people can return to their normal activities.”
“How long will it take?”
“It depends. For some people, a couple of weeks. For others it can take years.”
“Will I be able to run?”
“Let’s take this one step at a time,” she said.
“But, eventually, will I be able to run again?”
“We just can’t say. Many people do. Some people never run again. Your spine undergoes an awful lot of compression when you run. You certainly shouldn’t be running until you’re free of pain.”
Those were some dark days for the boy. Some of the darkest he’d ever known. It took over a month and powerful medications just for me to finally sleep again. For weeks I couldn’t tie my own shoes or lie on my side or drive a car or sit with my family at dinner. The pain was bad, but it wasn’t as bad as the thought that replayed in my head over and over– “Some people never run again.”
It was hard to accept help for things that had been easy for me to do before. I had to ask other people to lift anything heavier than a book. I needed someone else to clip my toenails. Even on short trips, I needed to ask someone to stop the car so I could get out and relieve the numbness and pain in my leg.
Sometimes in life, you grow so accustomed to the riches you have that you only see them when you lose them. So it was for me. I had grown accustomed to being strong and fast and daring, to being the guy who was up for anything. Now I was fragile. And I mourned all the things that had been taken away.
Winter passed into spring and spring into summer, and I did get better, but I didn’t get better better. I was able to walk and drive. I stopped taking medication. But I still couldn’t lift things or paddle a canoe or touch my toes. And then I stopped getting better. Everything plateaued. And occasionally something would set me back. I’d try to pull weeds or I’d slip on the ice, and something in my back would pop, and I would be back to limping again.
The only athletic activity that I could really do was walk. And even then, not very quickly. Sometimes I would cry. Sometimes I would tell myself to be brave and keep trying. Sometimes I would try not to think about it at all. Sometimes I would just imagine running again, with the wind in my hair and that free feeling of being able to go anywhere I wanted.
Running made me feel at home in my body. But now I didn’t want to be home in it. My body was broken. I wanted to move out. But unlike my dreamy childhood self, I couldn’t escape it. Pain held me in my body like a leash.
I might have stayed that way. I might still be that way even today, if I hadn’t found wise healers– physical therapists who helped me to start moving my body again. One gave me exercises that didn’t feel like anything. I told her that I didn’t think I would ever feel like myself again. And she would say, “Well, that’s a difficult thought to sit with,” and I (a forty-five year old man) would tear up there in her office. And then she’d give me some new movement to try. Whatever stretch or exercise it was, I would push into it the way I would push into running–looking for some kind of challenge. But she would remind me that I didn’t need to push into the stretch. She told me to find someplace well within my comfort zone, to stop pushing and start relaxing.
Another therapist put me on a treadmill and took a video of my gait. He showed me where a sprained ankle from my childhood had affected my stride and how changing how my feet landed on the ground could reduce the pressure on my spine. “So … does that mean, I might be able to run again?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah,” said the therapist matter-of-factly. “You’ll be running again.” By this point, it had been over a year of rehabilitation. But he said it with such nonchalant confidence that I almost believed it myself. I wanted to believe it so badly.
So, I did my exercises and my stretches. I tried to relax instead of push. I went slowly. And when setbacks happened, I went even slower. Until one day, nearly two years after the accident in the trampoline park, I laced up my shoes and ran two whole minutes without stopping. It was the hardest race I’d ever run.
For most of us, there is no practical reason to run. The persistence hunts are over. We’ll never get paid for it. It’s not our job. Unlike football or soccer, even being a superstar will not make you a household name or buy you a mansion. It will not win you love. Personally, I was never going to even be a local running contender. I was always going to be, at best, a little better than average. And now, most likely I’ll never even be that again.
So why keep doing it?
I expect there are as many reasons as there are runners, but right now, here’s mine. I run to feel that I am alive, and that at least a few times every week I meet life on our own terms. I run because I am here, because my body still can, and because when I run I know that I will not have done nothing with the brief, beautiful matchstrike of my life.
My own injury, as life-altering as it was, pales in comparison to the losses that others have suffered. On April 15th 2013, newlyweds Jessica Kenski and Patrick Downes were watching racers cross the finish line in the 117th Boston Marathon when a homemade explosive device left them as amputees. Downes lost a leg. Kenski, eventually, lost both legs. Those stories put my own in context. Even if I couldn’t tie my shoelaces, I still had a foot to put one on.
In 2016, Downs ran the Boston Marathon on a prosthesis. But in 2023 Kenski, after a no less heroic battle, celebrated the fact that she could stand in her own kitchen to cook a meal or wait in line for coffee.
For a long time, I berated myself for not preventing the trampoline accident. If only I’d done more core exercises, or did them with better form, or had avoided trampolines. But in the end, I had to come to terms with the fact that we don’t get to pick the bodies we get in this life. Even the best care cannot guarantee freedom from cancer, from injury.
I may never again run as I did before my injury. I may always be fragile in ways that I never had to think of before. But when I look at the running I can do, I can see that my body is still a wonderful place to live.
Consider the story of Derek Redmond, a track athlete who worked his whole life to earn a spot at the 1992 Olympics running the 400 meter. But in the semi-final, about halfway out, his hamstring tore, and he collapsed to the ground, in obvious agony. I remember watching it on TV when I was fourteen. At the time, I cared nothing for athletics at all. But I would never forget how Derek pushed the hovering medics away, and even though every other racer on the track had already crossed the finish line, he stood and limped as fast as he could. I will never forget the commotion in the stands behind him as a man pushes his way through security. It was Derek’s father. He ran to his boy and pulled Derek’s arm around his shoulder and walked with him the two hundred meters over the white line. I cannot recall who came in first that day. But any of the tens of thousands of spectators who surged to their feet in a standing ovation could have no doubt that Derek won that race.
I think what I’m trying to say is this: running isn’t really about running. It is just a metaphor, an arena in which we get to explore the best of ourselves. We don’t win by being fast. We don’t even win by finishing. We win because we choose to run at all. We step up to that line on the pavement. We say, “yes,” to this hard thing.
I run differently now than I ever have before. I’m slower sure, but I think I see running, more clearly, for what it is. When I stand at the starting line, I know that no one around me knows anything about my middle school gym class or my first marathon or that fateful day on the trampoline. They can’t know all it took for me to stand there. And, because of that, I can see how I don’t know anything about the races that are being run all around me. Maybe for some of them, it’s their first one ever. For some it is proof that you do not need to be young to be strong. Maybe some are running with cancer. Maybe some, like me, were told that they would never run again. Maybe some run because their dad alway ran this race, and now he’s gone and they will spend every mile remembering him. Some run out of defiance. Some run out of habit. Some run to become better people. Some run to celebrate who they are.
And that is another reason I run. When you stand beside people like that, even if you don’t know their story, you can feel their collective striving. Even if they don’t know you, their presence at shoulder is a way of saying that they believe that what you are doing there matters. That you are worthy compatriot. Sometimes that is all you need to keep going. It may not look like it from the sidelines, but running really is a team sport. We may all run our own race, but we all do it together.
The announcer calls everyone to their mark. You feel that last rush of adrenaline. “Get set,” she says. And all of that long story that you’re always telling yourself about who you are gets real quiet. And you come home. Here. To this muscle. This bone. This back. This breath. The horn sounds. And all at once, everyone moves, and for an instant, all you feel is joy.