Run Run Run

“You gotta run, run, run, run, run”

I haven’t always been a fan of running.  This is the story of how I became one; and the moment that you realize you have to make a change.

The Story

When I was younger, running was a necessary evil to my passion — sports.

I played football my first year of junior high school (seventh grade).  After a long career as the best quarterback in the street football games in my neighborhood, playing tackle football in pads against other people from other neighborhoods (and cities) was a huge wake up call.  Practice involved lots of running in the late summer heat.  I hated it.  I didn’t do well as quarterback and honestly don’t remember if I even bothered going out for the team in eighth grade.

My baseball and basketball careers took a similar turn — one of the best in the little bubble of my neighborhood, but couldn’t hang with other athletes in the city as I got older.  I played both sports through junior high, but missed out on both during freshman year of high school.

I remember the running being a differentiator — it seemed to be the majority of the tryout for each sport.

Did you have the stamina to keep up, or would you crumble when faced with another set of wind sprints?

I played center and power forward in basketball, and was a great shooter.  But the tryouts involved tons of running, and very little basketball.  I got cut during the first round.  I left with the feeling that the coach cared more about people who could run up and down the floor than someone who had a good basketball IQ (which I did).

Same story with baseball.  I played catcher and first base and was a decent hitter.  Baseball tryouts started in early spring.  There’s still snow on the ground and the sun goes down early, so tryouts were in the smaller of the two gyms at the high school.  There was a running track suspended above the gym floor, so that half the people could be up there running while the other half were down on the floor pitching and catching.  I was cut from the team before we ever got to practicing outside.

I joined the golf team.  There was no running involved, and I was sufficiently good enough to be a varsity sports letterman.

My physical fitness routine in my twenties involved anything but running — exercise biking, lifting weights, and swimming.  It kept me fit enough.  My early thirties was the time where children started to dominate my life and time.  Working out was still a frequent activity, but it involved working around the schedule of childcare.  I remember holding my first child while riding the exercise bike for hours.

Our second child came in August of 2012.  Having two kids was a huge adjustment.  When she entered the hospital in October of that year, our lives changed.  We went from being happy parents trying to juggle two kids under 3 at home, to parents with one kid on life support and the other living with grandparents and friends.

Our second child lived in a local hospital for seven months.  My wife and I were by her side for most of the journey.  Our only moments of respite were when we ducked out to grab a meal with each other, or a friend.  We balanced work and life as best as we could.  Our own health was never a focus.  As the months wore on, we eventually transitioned to spending more time away from the hospital.  And then she was discharged.  Her medical diagnosis meant that she was able to receive home care for a period of time. It honestly felt less like we were discharged and more like we took the hospital home with us.

It was summer of 2013.  I had just left home to commute to work.  I was parked at the stoplight at the end of the street waiting for the light to turn green.  The sun was rising and the air was humid.  For some reason, I tuned on the radio.  “Young Blood” by the Naked and Famous came on.  And it was that random moment that I decided that I had to make a change in my life.

I had to do something about my health.

When our daughter was discharged from the hospital, we were able to say farewell to many of the doctors who cared for her.  They were amazed by her progress.  We took celebratory pictures with some of them.  I still remember remember one photograph.  In it, I’m standing between one of my daughter’s physicians and my wife.  I’m wearing a button up shirt.  In the picture, you can see the tightness of the shirt — the buttons are stretching and you can see my undershirt.  My face is round and bloated.  At the time, my weight was close to 250 pounds.  I’ve never been a thin person, but that was the heaviest I’d ever been.  By a lot.  The endless amount of stress from the hospital stay, sedentary life of a hospital parent, and meals of fried food and beer had caught up with me.

I started to run around the neighborhood before going to work in the morning.  Each morning, I got up and ran before the night shift home care worker left for the day.  I spent 15 minutes running around the neighborhood and came home out of breath and covered in sweat.  Things got better the more I did it.

Later that summer, a good friend — who just so happened to be a long time runner — came over and we went for a longer run.  I hung with her for 4 miles, which was my longest distance ever at the time.  It validated that I could do it.

In the years since, I’ve run well over seven thousand miles.  I’ve lost nearly 50 pounds since that moment where I decided I was going to change.

The Lesson

Back to the moment of epiphany and the lesson about change.

While the story I told you — and that I tell myself — is that the decision to change was a moment of clarity — it probably wasn’t.  It’s more likely that the realization that I needed to change was slow and steady, and for whatever reason I made a decision in that moment to finally move forward with that change.  It’s the moment of decision that stuck in my head; not the other moments leading up to it.  In my case, I’m sure there were numerous times where I looked at myself in the mirror and thought that I needed to make a change.  But those moments are lost to the sands of time.

When it comes to change, there are times in our lives where the decision to change is obvious; or the decision to change is made for us.  Those are two sides of the change spectrum.  But there are three sides to every story.  The third side here is slow burn change.  This type of change takes days or months or years of the change lurking on the periphery of life, waiting for enough capital to be built up so that the scales tip in favor of actually making the change.

There’s a case to be made that slow burn change has a better chance of sticking than the other two sides of change.  In my case, the change proved to be a lasting one.  I’ve only increased the amount I run since I began to regularly do it in 2013.  It’s become a habit.

How has slow burn change manifested itself in your life?

The Velvet Underground — “Run Run Run”