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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.

For the next two years, anytime the weather permitted it, I would walk my local tech park. Rebuilding the stamina in my legs had taken time, but it had been worth it. My left thigh, which had atrophied from the knee surgery that removed the tissue that the Lyme disease had damaged, had built back the muscle that it had lost.

In 2021, I had still been a little cautious, building up to the full four mile walk of the tech park once the weather had gotten warm again, but by 2022, I was just going for the full distance. The mileage didn’t phase me anymore. It was like I was back to normal.

Except for the running. But it turned out, that was just due to a lack of trying. And that was soon put to the test.

It was a Sunday in autumn, most likely September, but maybe early October. It was still nice enough to walk, even at eight in the morning (I was still able to somewhat sleep in on weekends at that point). I was nearly halfway through the walk – which was only about a little over a mile away because my route wound in on itself a few times – when I got a call asking me where I was.

And that’s when I remembered I’d been asked by my mom if I could dog sit for them while they went to church. My mom had remarried, and her poor husband was standing outside my house with their dog, seeing my car was in the driveway but not being able to get inside.

As I apologized for forgetting about dog sitting, and letting him know how he could get into the house, I made a split decision. He was in the choir and only had twenty minutes to get to church. He’d been expecting to just be able to drop off the dog and go. I couldn’t keep him waiting for me to walk back to the house.

For the first time in 5 years, I ran.

And it was ugly. I got winded within minutes. My legs got sore from the exertion. My muscles were probably wondering what the hell I was doing. I tried to jog at a gradual pace, and still had to stop twice and restart again at an even slower speed.

I got back to my house in about 15 minutes. My pace when I had been running long distances had been about 10 minutes, and was about 9 when I was pushing myself for speed. My hopes to have picked up where my running had left off years ago had been dashed. It felt like I could’ve gotten there just as quickly if I’d walked the whole way back.

Or so I thought.

When I got to my house to take the dog, my mom’s husband gave me a look of surprise. “That was fast,” he said. He didn’t even ask if I’d run. He was shocked when I’d told him I had. It was pretty clear he’d ruled that out as a possibility after the last 5 years. I know I had after just trying it.

But his reaction got me thinking. I clearly hadn’t taken as long to “rush” back as I’d thought. What was more, I immediately took the dog for a walk that combined with the one I’d aborted, got me to around the 4 mile distance I typically walked. And the most important thing was, even as bad as the run had gone, there were no aches and pains, no soreness. I’d come out of the run just fine.

It was this impromptu run to get back to my house to dog sit like I’d promised that made me pose the question to myself:

Were my running days not really behind me?

Once I got into the daily routine of walking the local tech park to start my morning, the only thing that stopped me was the weather. If the day was a rainout, I would reluctantly skip the walk altogether, but if it was nice enough to walk, I was usually out there as soon as my alarm went off at 5. This schedule continued through the end of September, to the point where the sun hadn’t even come up by the time I’d returned home from the walk. It wasn’t until October, when it had also started to get too cold in the morning, when I finally stopped my daily walks.

But even then, it hit 70 over night twice during the rest of 2020, and I was quick to capitalize on getting out there for the walks again.

While walking definitely got me back into fitness activities, there’s still a gulf between walking and running. During the social distancing era, I had also started incorporating light running into my daily fitness.

Backing up a little bit, in the winter of 2019, I had bought a fitness game for the Nintendo Switch called Ring Fit Adventure. The game included a Pilate wheel and a leg strap, each of which you would fit one of the Switch’s joycons into. The one inserted in the Pilate wheel would register any push and pull you made, as well as how you were holding it for things like Yoga poses. The one inserted into the leg strap would simulate how fast you were moving.

The concept behind the game was that you would navigate your way through levels, beating enemies by performing various different fitness exercises. By running in place, the game would simulate you running through the level. This was something I’d been nervous about, but I felt I could control my pace and move at a speed that was faster than a walk, but not really a run.

I had only found time to play it a hand full of times before the pandemic forced to world to shut down. Then, when I found myself telecommuting every day, I started incorporating this into my daily routine. My mornings started off with the four mile walk, and after work, I started to boot up the game more and more and play for longer and longer.

At first, I was playing it two times a week, alternating it between building up my stamina to walk the tech park, as well as exercising on my elliptical. I was also doing these exercises in my compression socks. Then, after I built up the stamina to walk the entire tech park and started my mornings with this exercise, I bumped it up to three days a week, alternating it just with the elliptical. I’d also stopped wearing the compression socks, because I wasn’t using them anymore, and although this sometimes had me nodding off after the workout, I built up the stamina to handle these exercises as well.

As telecommuting stretched out into the summer, and admittedly as I was growing burnt out from playing the game, I cranked up not just the number of times per week I did these exercises to every day after work, I also increased the play length to ninety minutes each day. I was also started to really go after it in these exercises, reaching the max difficulty it had to offer. I went from gingerly running in place, attempting to not aggravate my knee, to confidently running in place to try to get through as many levels as I could in one session.

And the more I did it, the more my body got used to running again. I had proved to myself that my legs could take the stress of running in place on a daily basis.

It was a great next step in my journey back to running. But I still had a long way to go to get into marathon shape. I had proved that I could run indoors, in place, for an extended period of time, and on a daily basis. But it would still be a few years before I tested myself to see if I could run not only outside, but from one point to another.

When the world was forced to social distance in the wake of Covid, I knew that I needed to do something with this time. Being laid up due to my Lyme Disease was still very fresh in my mind, and I didn’t want to repeat just watching the days slip by not doing anything. I knew the five weeks to flatten the curve was overly optimistic. This was going to take at least a month longer than that projection. I had no idea it would turn into the better part of two years, but then again, no one did. I wanted to feel like I’d done something with this time.

I wanted this time to matter.

It was during this time that I committed to a routine of listening to audiobooks for two hours every morning while I worked. When my tasks were menial, I could both do my job and take in a story. This is also when I jumped in headfirst to online courses through Udemy. There were so many different subject areas I’d always been interested in that I now had the time to pursue.

It was also when I committed to getting onto the path of fitness again.

There was a tech park within short walking distance of my house that I hadn’t been able to traverse since I had gotten Lyme. I hadn’t ventured back to it for three years. My walking had improved, but I still needed to wear compression socks to get around with some energy. And the couple times I tried to run at the gym, I was exhausted after only a couple of laps. The path I used to walk in the tech park was over four miles. I just didn’t think I had the stamina for it after a day at work.

Only now, with the world shut down and social distancing, I wasn’t going into work. The only walking I was doing was around my house, and when it got nice enough, around my back patio as I started to enjoy bringing my laptop there and working outside all day. My daily steps were greatly reduced, and combined with the need to want to avoid being confined in the house for as much as possible, I decided now would be a good time to venture back to the tech park.

I didn’t tackle the full four miles at first. For the first month, I would only walk to the park, and walk a very small portion of it. I would only do this three times a week, every other weekday, and was still wearing compression socks, but it was progress! On the days I wasn’t making this walk, I was on the elliptical for fifteen to twenty minutes, building up my leg strength in another way that allowed me to sit.

After getting used to this distance, I began extending the route a little bit more. I think I was only going a mile and a half at this point, I was still staying under two miles. But by this point I had stopped wearing compression socks because of the little I needed to walk around during the day in my house, and I was finding I wasn’t drained after these walks.

Psyching myself up, I decided to go for it. It would be a big jump, but the walk the tech park was laid out, if I was going to walk beyond two miles, I’d had to turn around and walk pretty much the entire distance back away, so I might as well just commit to the full four miles. By this point, the calendar had turned to May, the shut down had already been extended three times, and didn’t look to have an end in sight.

I went for it.

I loved being able to walk the whole distance of the tech park again. And again. And again. I increased the number of times I walked it per week, from three times after work per week to the first thing I did every morning while it was warm enough out. From mid-May through the end of September, if the weather allowed it, I started my day off with the morning four mile walk of the tech park. Like a lot of things during the shut down, it became an every day part of my routine, and even five years later, its still something I’m doing.

I had regained my stamina, at least for walking distances. And I could see my thigh, which had atrophied after the surgery, had regained the meat around the bone. I was still a long way from running, but I’d formed the foundation to one day get back into that activity.

My goal for the first half of 2023 was to improve my screenplay of Dig Down. I did this by finding screenwriting contests to enter into that provided valuable notes and feedback. This, along with the two script consultations I had in the first five months, provided incredible insights, not just for my screenplay, but for screenwriting in general.

It also gave me a direction to navigate towards next in my screenwriting journey, which was to write a screenplay with a brand new story, not an adaptation of one I’d already written in another medium. While the end goal was clear, the path to get there wasn’t. This meant having to come up with a new idea suitable for a script, and my ideas were growing grander and grander, so that even a novella wouldn’t suffice.

But it was another goal that would at first slow my screenwriting progress, but later lead me towards it.

While my goal for the first half of 2023 was writing, my goal for the second half was to run in my first marathon.

As I mentioned in my bio on this site, I took my first steps towards publishing while I was laid up recovering from knee surgery. I had been dealing with chronic pain from Lyme Disease for nearly a year as it had damaged the tissue around my knee. Rehab had gotten me back my mobility, but I felt my running days were over. The year before I started having these issues, I had run in my first ever half marathon, with plans to run in my first marathon the following year, only for this to be derailed by Lyme.

I could only job couple of laps on the indoor track, and there was a noticeable bob and drastic change in elevation to my gait every time I planted the leg I had had surgery on. I was also noticeably slower, yet was getting winded and fatigued after these two tenths of a mile. Even walking a mile was an effort, especially if I forgot to wear my compression socks.

And then world shut down due to Covid. I was working from home with nowhere to go. It definitely made it easy on my legs, not having to walk around as much to get to where I needed, but it was tough on me not getting to move around and go anywhere during this time.

This was just a couple years after I’d already felt like I was confined to my house because of how bad my knee had gotten. That had been the worst year of my life, and I knew right at the start of the lockdown that I wasn’t just going to watch the days slip by again.

I’d lose my mind if I didn’t get out of the house.

I had no idea that this need would eventually lead to me on the path to running in my first marathon. And that that would have a domino effect, and lead to me developing the story for the brand new script I’d need to write to continue my screenwriting journey.

The Toronto International Film Festival was a wonderful event and a great distraction to the latest challenge I was facing in my screenwriting career: coming up with a new screenplay idea. I had slowly been gravitating towards the understanding that I would have to write a new story if I was going to continue down this route rather than adapt another one of my books, and attending TIFF at least allowed me to feel I was doing something toward my career, though not as much as I would’ve liked as the writer’s strike was still ongoing.

Once I returned from the festival, my focus shifted to two main goals. The latter was continuing to develop an outline for a new book, the first novel I was intending to publish. Although I was still interested in furthering my screenwriting, it wasn’t my intention to do so at the expense of the rest of my writing, and I felt I had an idea worth fleshing out and drafting a manuscript for.

You might be asking if I was already outlining a new story, why not just write this as a script? The reason is that the story I had in mind would have been too massive for a script. Keep in mind, it was only 3 months ago that I had been told that I needed to shorten my screenplay of Dig Down to 90 pages, and the story I was cultivating currently would be at least double the size.

Focusing on outlining a new manuscript was worthwhile to me because I don’t view working on one story as an impediment to other ideas, but rather something I’m doing while I’m waiting for them to materialize. Since my goal was to come up with a new story idea to turn into a script, and I didn’t have one, I felt the wrong thing to do was sit around waiting for the right idea to strike.

I also felt the worst thing I could do was try to force coming up with a new idea.

So I continued to work on and craft different ideas to pour into this manuscript, as once again I could at least point to some progress being made in my writing. Meanwhile, it would actually be the other goal I was working towards during this time that would lead me to my next steps in my screenwriting, and it had nothing to do with writing.

That goal was running in my first marathon.