LCFC#6: Why I run (again)
Plus: The speed of other animals, if they were my size
Last week, I went running with my husband.
Wait? I went running. And I have a husband.
If you had told early-thirties me that I would say that sentence out loud and it’d be true, I probably would have laughed, or cried.
I never dreamed I’d run again after doctors told me I shouldn’t and after I got shocked while running at my sister’s house in 2017. And I never dreamed I’d get married (a story for another time); I’d settled on life as the cool, single aunt.
So to say I run with my husband is a symbol of my mental and physical fortitude these last few years, maybe longer.
You might wonder why I’d take up running again after enduring a disease in which exercise was one of the underlying reasons why my health deteriorated so rapidly.
I’ll tell you why. Because I can. Because, as my doctors remind me each month, I no longer have heart disease. Because when I’m running (or swimming or surfing), I feel alive.
I could get into the science of where that feeling might come from (hormones that activate opiate receptors and more) but today I’ll stick with the psychology and philosophy of why I run and why I’ve returned to it six years after stopping.
Any type of sport is painful. I’ll actually admit working my way up to running was excruciating, to the point where I wanted to quit, to the point where I finally understood why people hate working out — something I just couldn’t fathom a decade ago. But as the burning set in, something inside, something I can’t yet explain, made me push harder.
Long ago, exercise was like an addiction. (I’ll let you be the judge of whether that’s healthy or not.) And I was told to stop. There was a period of withdrawal, where all I wanted to do was burst into a sprint; there were pangs of jealousy when I saw other runners bobbing by while I walked along, sometimes slower than a snail1, if one were my size; and there was overall self-loathing, which came, I think as a result of not getting that hit of life exercise gave me.
I had reconciled never having that hit again. I’d learned to channel it vicariously through my nieces’ gymnastics, my nephew’s swimming and my husband’s cycling. I definitely needed that vicarious hit in the weeks leading up to my heart transplant; at that point, I couldn’t cross our house without getting winded — an experience that made me feel so un-alive.
So when I took my first walk after the transplant last October and only my legs, not my heart and lungs, crackled with fatigue, I was startled. There was anxiety with walking to work through, but despite stitches in my chest and tubes dangling from my neck and body — I had that little bit of fire, a fire now fueled with every run I take.
My husband and I joked that I was walking slower than a snail. (I was walking at 1 mile/hr in cardiac rehab, pre-surgery and getting fast heart rhythms, aka arrhythmias.) So while writing this piece, I wanted to fact check our snail joke and came across this cool website where you can enter your height and calculate their speed, if they were your size. And sure enough, I was SLOWER than a snail! Check out the site to do your own calculations.
