The seedling that I could run again had been firmly planted into my mind. I’d run in place with no issue for a whole 90 day workout routine for the Nintendo Switch game Ring Fit Adventure. And when I tried to run a distance, it was ugly, but I didn’t experience the knee pain I’d come to associate with Lyme, either during or after the run. I felt I could run again, but there was really only one way to be sure.
I had to do it.
It was getting too cold to run outside, and it was also getting toward the end of the year, so like most everyone who had the goal of exercising, I made it my New Year’s Resolution. Beginning in January 2023, I started running at the indoor track. I decided I wasn’t going to bite off more than I could chew. I had gotten winded just running a small stretch over the fall, so any stamina I’d once had six or seven years ago was long gone. I would just run three laps, barely a little over a fifth of a mile.
It wasn’t much, but it was a start. In fact, it was the same start I was attempting in 2019, before Covid had derailed everything. Just three laps, to say I did it. To have a starting point to build off of. Four years later, and I was back at that same square one.
Except I wasn’t.
I felt it after the three laps. My shins for some reason felt most of the impact, feeling stiff the rest of the day, and remaining so after each of those subsequent early runs. I was getting winded as well, though I figured out later that wasn’t necessarily all because of my lack of conditioning. My body felt like one that hadn’t been pushed to run in years, but things were different than they had been four years ago.
My knee didn’t feel like it was being stabbed in the side behind the patella every time I planted my leg. I no longer needed to wear the compression socks just to have the energy to work out. My knee didn’t need to be iced because it hadn’t swelled after the run. And something that I’m not sure I even noticed on that first run, but definitely observed after I started getting into a running routine – my head was no longer bobbing from the change in elevation because of the limp my body had developed to compensate for my bad knee.
For the previous four years, I had challenged my body to hold up to the rigors of a workout routine that required me to run in place, and to walk for four miles on a daily basis at times. My body’s ability to meet that challenge was the foundation I’d been given to see if I could make that next step forward and actually run.
It didn’t take long to see that when my body was given this challenge to make the next leap forward, it soared.