Running for my life

It was a year ago this summer. I was in a spot that running seemed like a good idea. I was trying to get fit, or at least, less-not-fit. It was not the first time I regularly ran. A few years previous I had even completed a half marathon. Not fast or impressively, but I finished. Only stopping with the desire to curl up and die one time. That’s pretty good, I think. This current shot at running was different than the previous attempts. And not in a good or meaningful way. I was generally less committed to the idea and my third hip surgery had just happened and I already knew that running was not great for fake hips, but god damn it, I was going to do it anyway. If maybe a bit half assed. Maybe I could get half fit, or something.. 

I had a pal, Ryan, that was willing to run with me. Charity work, probably. Done in the same spirit that people do court ordered community service. Ryan is an actual runner. Sub-eight minute miles for well more than one mile. The type of runner that can put in a respectable half marathon time without changing his regular routine. Nothing different, no big deal. You know, an asshole. Sure, He had done the work, and now he was running with me. He even pretended to enjoy it. Seriously… He was just doing it because his conscious required it, I’m sure of that. A friend of his needed motivation and two runs a day probably couldn’t hurt, right. Our runs were the warm up for Ryan’s actual effort. For me these runs were full cardiovascular destruction. There was not enough Gatorade to replace the electrolytes lost. I’m not sure he even broke a sweat. Also, Ryan would make me run just a bit faster than I was comfortable running. Or even capable of running. It was a good deal slower than his average pace, and he was quick to prove that fact by talking to me the entire time. Talking about life, and nothing in particular, just two dudes being vulnerable with each other. You know, making real human connection, or whatever. Ryan’s questions forced me to talk and talking forced me to gasp for air and gasping for air made my hands go numb because running at a full clip and talking about the emotional complexities of life is about the hardest thing I have ever done in my whole life. But, he got me running, and faster. There was a point, even, that I was starting to enjoy it.

Then this day came and it was July in Fort Collins. Summer at high altitude. The sun is intense up here and the dog days hit the 90’s, easily. Also, most of my running happened on my lunch break. Peak sun and miserable. I thought that running at inopportune times and temperatures would make me stronger, tougher. Also, it was the only time that worked for my schedule. Running before work was a hard pass, too early. And the evening was filled with my family and my dinner and my life outside of the quest for slightly better fitness. Also, if I ran at lunch I could get paid to run and that felt right. Because who would do this for free? There were showers at the office, too. In total, change-run-shower-change, was less than an hour if done efficiently. 

At the time I was running about three days a week. Mostly the same loop along the dirt trails near the river. Round about three miles, pacing somewhere between 9.5 and 10 minute miles.The trails along the river had two primary uses, recreation for those that know they are there and walking routes for hobos to locate a night’s encampment or a place to poop. I am not sure who got there first, probably the hobos, but generally the relationship between user groups is uneventful. There are endless loops on these trails, both sides of the river, that can be lapped and used to squeeze out a quick lunch run for the people downtown or a big time mountain bike romp, if allotted more time. Typically I would run these trails for 30-35 minutes, sometimes with Ryan, sometimes alone. I rarely even encountered other people. Which was better because I have a self-conscious thing about being seen in shorts and we already know about my issues with talking and running, so like, if Ryan wasn’t coming I preferred solitude, all the way. 

This day in particular, a Tuesday, maybe, was all of the things that a mid-day summer run was supposed to be, hot, a bit buggy by the water and very dusty. Ryan was not with me, but he put me through the ringer on the previous day, so I was consciously running as fast as I could in an effort to be able to talk and run at the same time. You know, training. I had decided, earlier that morning, that my new fitness goal was to be able to run a sub-10 minute mile and talk about my feelings at the same time. It was audacious. I might as well have said that I was trying to play ping-pong at an Olympic level. But I was setting my mind to it. So, there I was, on the hobo trails, hammering as fast as my mostly broken body would take me. 

Lunchtime, I left the office, hooked over the river on the bike path, made my way through the trees and up to the Shields Street ponds for a lap of the first one. The shorter of the two potential routes up there at the ponds. Maybe three miles total when done, maybe. But I was tired from the day before and I was running by myself, so, like, whatever, a bit less than three miles was going to be fine. I lapped the pond and I was sweating profusely. The silty river dust from the trail was sticking to my body, making a high grit sandpaper out of my skin. It was brutal, but my pace was 9:05 and I think I may have even been smiling. I hit the single track to the bridge, jumped on the bike path for a second and immediately jumped back on the single track, heading downstream from the spur into the most exciting of this route’s dirt. It starts with a long ribbon of a lead up, then hits a smallish drop, serpentines through thick brush and rises for a culvert. At one point you get so close to the bank of the river falling in with a misstep is an actual possibility. It is truly beautiful in there. 

There are a few downed trees suspended in the heights of other trees that you have to be aware of, three in total on that stretch. One is high enough that no real ducking is required, just recognition. One is low enough that slowing down and really thinking about what you’re doing is required. And the third is somewhere in between, based on your stature. This section is very exciting because I never remember which tree is located where and keeping your head on a swivel is mandatory. I hit this passage with good pace. Training at a clip that would make running with Ryan more enjoyable in the future. I was hauling. I came to find that the first tree is the slow down and duck tree, and I made it through just fine. No big whoop. Confidence was very high and I thought that the highest of the three downed trees was next, so, running hard and at my VO2 max I was ready to barely duck upon seeing the mostly horizontal trunk of the next tree at the blackening edges of my periphery. I was excited, things were going well, maybe I was a runner after all, even my breathing was solid and then bang, everything went black. Well, not exactly. It wasn’t a bang, so much as the sound of a thud. My head hitting an immovable wooden object while running as fast as I am capable of running makes the sounds you think it would make. It is a thud. And then I heard six or seven cracks as the vertebrae in my spine individually crackled and popped as the shock wave of the impact went down my neck and into my back. It was then, at the sixth or seventh spinal clap, when everything went black. I guess I do remember hitting the ground, though, in a lifeless heap.

I have no awareness to how long I was laying on the ground. But when I stood up I was totally covered in river silt. It was all over my body as if there was no left or right side that was on the ground, but more of a complete puddling of my skin. The first thing I recognized upon regaining awareness was that my hat was gone from my head and my head was bleeding and the blood was streaming down my forehead and face, treating the ridge of my right eyebrow as an island in the river’s flow. My hat was stuck to the tree and two small streams of red were draining on either side of my eye, mixing with the dust caked to my cheeks. It was creating a weird, muddy river of blood and silt coursing down my face. The Mighty Mississippi of crainio-facial injuries. I was up, though, standing and then walking, concussed but not paralyzed. Awash with the sense that karmically I had this coming. Running with confidence was not something I should have been doing. I have two prosthetic hips and generally poor attitude towards exercise. I deserved this injury. Confused and hot, I needed to make it back to the showers at work. A bit over a mile to go I started walking, a speed walk, to be sure, definitely not a run. In short order I hit the College Ave underpass went up and over to the north side of the river and started moving down the hobo trail towards the office. 

This was the fastest route possible. No loli-gagging or directional adjustments. This path was as close to a crow flying than any other option. Up to the road bridge, across the river and a hard right onto the dirt at the northside river bank. As I was dodging tall grass behind the Feed Store I was trying to wipe blood from my eye and keep moving, one foot in front of the other. Approaching a concrete embankment before the train trestle I saw a human form in the side glance of my right and bloody eye. This human form was actively engaging his core and glutes and legs in a wall sit. A very standard fitness maneuver. Back against the wall and straining. In the moment I did think- that’s a weird place to do a wall sit- but I was pretty concussed and confused. Quickly I became convinced that my concussion was causing hallucinations because this wall sitter was sitting against a river embankment, grey pants around the ankles and shooting a very aggressive poop all over the embankment wall and the ground below. This was a moment in which two separate trail user groups came to loggerheads. He started screaming at me about his privacy and my intrusion into his space and how I should quickly leave the area. At this point I had already started running. Walking was no longer going to cut it. The concussion related hallucination of a pooping transient screaming at me about modesty put the pep back in my step. A hard left off the trail and I was flying. A full detour towards Vine Ave. Through the fields behind the buildings and warehouses, grass was almost waist high and I could not see the ground. My shirt was whipping in the wind and my stride felt long and easy. Adrenaline had dropped all thoughts of the blood on my face and head, and the outside temperature was no longer registering an issue. I really was flying. That last, concussed, but adrenaline fueled, mile clocked in at a bloody and disoriented 7 minutes and 55 seconds. My fastest mile ever.

When I got back to the office I took at 35 minute shower in the employee locker room using someone else’s soap and shampoo. Thankfully I had my own towel. My head had a huge lump and kind of a small cut. I thought the cut should have been bigger based on the amount of blood. I didn’t run again for a week or so. No major headaches struck around, nor were there gaps in memory caused by the concussion. I did have a sense of elation from the last mile, and a bit of disorientation from the head shot, but life moved on at a normal pace from there. To this day I have not passed under the northside train trestle for fear of what I might find. But after that day I was able to run a bit faster and understand what my broken body was capable of. I was able to tell Ryan this very story while running the following week and recognize that some aspects of exercise should be hard and others should be easy. Also, weird stuff can happen out there, fear can be a good motivator, and keep your head up because you are taller than you think. All that aside, no matter what else happens, this is a big strange world and I ran a sub eight minute mile. I’ll always have that…