Following last year’s knee surgery (and the liver tumor the year before, and the 11 concussions before that, and the two knee surgeries before that) this past summer I once again embarked on trying to return to being the distance runner I used to be. To give you a sense of the starting point: for about a month I was restricted to jogging for 1 minute, followed by walking for 1 minute. It wasn’t until early July that I actually ran a full mile at one time. I mixed in a lot of biking and swimming to ease the buildup, and by the grace of God by September I was able to run most days and, if I may be so bold as to say, was running fast (compared to where I’d been for the last 8 years, at least).

As you know, I’ve been on this “comeback trail” many times, and there is a point in the process, a beautiful point in the process, where going for a run can be relaxing. For the first few weeks/months, every run, no matter how slow, is arduous and tiring. At no point does the run feel like not work, no matter how far it is. However, I have found that after a while, you will one day go out on a run and be surprised to find that you are relaxed and actually enjoying yourself (your VO2 Max is such that you’re not just dying every time you run). It is an incredible gift, especially for one who used to know that “relaxed running” feeling so well.

Anyway, this is all a preamble to the moment I want to highlight. This fall, I’ve started running after school and before picking my girls up from daycare. They go to daycare on the northwest side of town, so I would drive there and run from the daycare, heading northwest on 1st St which then turns into 25th St. SE (out by the Catholic cemetery). About 1.5 miles out, you come to a big hill. There was a day the first week of December where I went for a run. It had snowed recently, so the road and the fields were covered with white, and it was cold but not bitter. There was a light breeze, and as I ran it began to lightly dust snow. It was about 4pm, so the sun was beginning to set as well. 

I went about 1.5 miles out, just past the top of that gravel hill, then turned around to head back. I started back down the hill, then stopped. The sky had a pinkish hue because of the setting sun, the light flurries were dusting around me in the light breeze, and everything was silent and peaceful. And, of course, I felt alive from having run there. If I had driven out to that point, and then gotten out of my car and looked…sure, it would have been beautiful. But there is something about running to somewhere beautiful and running there alone, the solitude and physical exertion mixed with the surroundings, that is magnificent. It’s an experience I used to have back in the day (when my body would let me go 8 or 10 miles away from town into the middle of the country, and I’d find myself alone on a beautiful desolate gravel road, with wind through the grass or a wonderful sunset or something). It had been 8 years since I’d last felt this feeling.

So amidst the beauty and peace of solitude, there was also immense and deep gratitude. Gratitude that, amidst all the other gifts that I have been given, here too I had been given this chance to to experience something like this again, given that there have been so many times where it seemed like that stage of my life was completely over. So beauty, but beauty deepened by peace, solitude, and gratitude.