Running

If there’s one exercise I really enjoy it’s climbing, of course. But another exercise I really enjoy is running. Yes, I know that sounds odd. Surely I mean running with my crutches, right?

Nope! Ever since I was a kid I’d wanted to run a marathon. The problem is, I didn’t think I could run at all. But at some point I read a book about Wilma Rudolph. She was a track and field star who overvame Polio (I’ll talk more about her in a different post). I remember thinking something like ‘wow, I wanna do that!’ Now, I could just run on my crutches, and I sometimes still do. It’s great for the shoulders and it doesn’t take as much thought. But I wanted to run without my crutches.

When I was about 20 years old, I used to watch people run. I’d pay attention to how people used their legs. For example, When people start their spring, the back leg pushes pretty hard off the ground, and for a moment the runner is in the air until they bring that back leg forward so it becomes the front leg. There’s also the fact that people tend to spring and land on their toes.

Here’s the thing though: sheer willpower isn’t always enough. It’s one thing to learn the mechanics of an exercise, but that doesn’t mean your body can just magically do it. But, as some of you know, I can be very stubborn, so I worked at it until I could do something that loosly resembled running. I spent the next few years training my body and mind to do what I saw. I did things like jumping rope, using exercise bikes, and even learning how to deadlift (that’s more recent), and eventually it started to come together.

Fast forward to this week. I went running yesterday for the first time in a bit. I’d gone running off and on before, but it’s been a particularly long amount of time since my last steady running stint so I knew it was going to be hard.

And hard it was. It’s cold out these days, so I’m stiffer than I was the last time I tried. I was also running on less even terrain than the last time, so there’s also that. As a result, I ended up falling a few times. But the first fall wasn’t a normal fall. I got yeeted and skidded along tha pavement. My hands took quite the beating as a result. And when I wasn’t falling over, I was still causing a ton of damage to my shoes.

That’s actually one of the hardest parts about running. My shoes get absolutely destroyed when I’m just starting out, which means I would have to buy 3 or 4 pairs in the span of a month or else I just can’t run. That happens because I tend to drag my feet due to weak ankle control. When I run more consistently, my body figures out and remembers how to avoid that, somewhat, so my sneakers and body take less of a beating.

This is what things looked like after yesterday. I’d torn up the palms of my hands and my sneakers became literally unusable.

That doesn’t mean I’m going to stop. It just means that I’ll have to be more careful about how I reintroduce running to my legs. I went a mile (no I didn’t run the whole time; it was a mix of running and walking), so maybe keeping it to about a block or so at a time would’ve been better. It’ll get better, it’s just going to take a while. When I get better at it (and if I get myself a head cam) I’ll do a live on instagram and take you all with me.

I’ll be doing a part two to this where I go into a more in-depth explanation of the various exercises that helped me get to the point where I could run at all, so keep an eye out for that.