#amrunning

The nerve in my leg slowly tingled to life, but I had to learn to walk again. Or, maybe not quite learn, but I had to practice walking. A lot. From micro-distances like going to the bathroom without propping myself against something, to short outings around the building. Those became gradually longer walks around the neighbourhood. Then longer still.

Back at work Paul, a colleague with big mouth and rugby-sized shoulders, enjoyed acting out my bent office crawl. He wasn't bad either, but one can only laugh so much at his own misery. As days of Paul's shenanigans wore on, I kept the smile plastered on my face while he clowned around the office, stumbling and falling over the chairs and imitating - badly! - my accent, but internally I just wanted to kick his ass. One day he overheard me telling a lady co-worker how I managed to run a lap around my building. Paul stopped, inserted himself between me and her and said "so, are we going to run a marathon?" with a wink to her and a goofy grin.

"Is that a challenge?" I asked before I even thought about it.

He looked me in the eye, really LOOKED for the first time in the long while. His smile soured. Nobody laughed. Then his chin lifted.

"Sure," he said with defiance - "if you think you can do it, I'm in. Just don't blame me if you fail."

That was untypically sullen answer for Paul the jokester, and it gave me great satisfaction.

I focused on the next year's marathon in our city. I knew nothing about training for a marathon, but there's so much about it online that I only needed to choose the training plan that looked the most doable. I opted for a slow 20-weeks training plan. It was a fantastic learning process. I made mistakes, many of them, and I learned from them. The magical thing that happened along the way was that running became easy. I mean, at first I'd go out for a run and had to walk back slowly, winded and exhausted. When I managed 5 kms without stopping and without walking, I felt like celebrating! Then it lengthened to 7 kms, to 8, 10 and more. I could think about things other than how to make another step and where to put the next foot. I noticed the neighbours mowing lawns, the goldfinches flying beside me in that funny way of theirs: two wing-flaps then a short drop, then two flaps again. I passed a skunk strolling by the sidewalk — it gave me a surprised look, but didn't seem threatened by me, while I couldn't say the same. I chased the squirrel who sprinted atop the fence next to me faster than I could run. In short, I learned to enjoy the act of running.

The climax of this story is very anti-climatic, I'm afraid. I ran my marathon. It was the first of many. It was also my fastest marathon, at 3h 05min. Paul never showed up. His teasing ceased long before the race and he always had somewhere else to be when I showed up at work. Still, I'm grateful for his teasing. His big mouth set me on the lifelong path of running.