Running For A Purpose

In June last year I walked into a consultants room. My life focus was about to change. Three weeks before, I had woken with excruciating pain in my shoulder. By the next day I had zero use of my left arm. A seriously painful MRI scan later and several wrong diagnoses and I was en route to a meeting with a neuro surgeon. He ordered another MRI from a different angle and I walked into his room. First thing he said as he looked me in the eye was, "It's quite possible you might not walk again".  I'd somehow managed not just to slip a disc but in his words:  to "explode it". 

Aim For A Target

(Image © Nicholas Raymond)

I didn't tell anyone that line for a long time. I made light to other people about the way he had said he would fly out on holiday a day late so as to do the operation. "Do anything for money". He told me to take it extremely careful. No public transport. Nothing where I might accidentally move some part of my neck. My mum wasn't fooled though. (Not sure I can remember the last time I fooled my mum!). She got it it day one and left me in doubt that I was going to have the operation. And yes, I still thought there was a decision to make. On the day of the operation, the surgeon was more upbeat. His focus at that point was on my arm telling me I would probably get no movement back but after two years It was possible I might achieve some. 

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Came round. Wiggled my toes. Grinned. Went back to sleep. And decided to fight. 

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Seems really silly now. Like it was never a reality. I remember a few key things in the weeks that followed. I remember the physio looking at the MRIs and my zero neck and arm movement and commenting that I'd done it "properly" and then bringing a colleague in to show him the extent of the damage.

Several people, including some very close to me, told me I needed a different, more sedate approach to life. It isn't clear how I "exploded" the disk. I surely didn't want to run that risk again. And no, I don't. Bit I want to live too. And this has made me think about what I can do rather than what I can't. I wasn't interested in taking it easy though. I'd been told I wouldn't move my arm and so to start with I was focused on changing that. 

I realised how easy I had had it in life. Sport Billy, a friend used to call me. I could do any sport. But I never really pushed it. Never excelled in anything. Just did it to a decent level.  Waking up, I had decided not to do that. I would find something I wanted to do and then try properly.  Didn't matter how good I was, I just wanted to compete. With myself.

I had a few short term goals I needed to prove to myself. First, playing football again (that's how I think I originally did it) and second, getting that arm moving. No way was I going to wait two years,  I played football way too soon, but came back to play harder, better than I ever did in my youth. A proper desire replacing the take it easy approach. I tried various sports, to the varying horror, and to be fair, increasing interest, of the physio who quietly quite liked my 'do or die approach' as he named it. I'd managed to start to get movement in my arm, but try as I might I couldn't get rid of a certain degree of pain and stiffness in my neck .  My back was just a mass of tight muscles where I had been compensating for an injury about to happen for maybe as much as eighteen months, 

And then, although I had been subconsciously staving it off for months, depression hit. I was nothing for two months, at rock bottom. No steps, no focus, only weekly football giving me any escape. And in January, mainly to combat my depression, I started to run. I was on holiday in Devon. In a seriously hilly bit of Devon. I went out every morning in that first week of January, walking a bit, and running a bit. By the end of the week I was running the whole loop. Just four miles, but four miles of tough hills in tough winds. When I got home, I could run. I could run for miles. Eight, nine miles. For the first time in my life. 

And so now I run. I try and run every day. I probably shouldn't, but I can move my arm completely now and I feel fitter than ever.  And I have never felt fitter. And I love it. I love that feeling of dropping into that zone where you feel you can go forever. I've done 100 miles in January, 100 miles in February and want to do that every month this year. I've signed up for my first half marathon in 25 years. Am so focused in completing it. 

There are loads of people way worse off than me but it's all personal right? Running a half might not be a great deal to many people but to me, the MK Half on Sunday is about achieving something that at one point I thought was beyond me. 

Because once. Just once. Someone told me they weren't sure I would walk again. That kind of upset me . I'm not sure I like people telling me what I can't do.