The Long Run

I signed up to run a 5K less than two weeks after I discovered I was capable of running. 

 

On January 4, 2025, I ran for the first time since February of 2024. And while I say ran, it certainly wasn’t pretty. My form and gait were awkward, and it looked and felt funky, but I didn’t care. I could run again. And so, when registration for the Big House 5K opened up on January 15, 2025, I immediately signed up. 

 

I’ve never been a big runner. I ran track and cross country for the first two years of high school, but I was the slowest on the teams and only did it because of a scheduling quirk at my high school that made this the best way I could fit basketball, the sport I really cared about, into my schedule. I started running again the summer after sophomore year of college, when I had an internship in DC and didn’t want to pay for a gym membership. I was still slow, but it was the cheapest and most accessible form of exercise for me. As I started running more frequently — just for myself and just because I wanted to — little by little, I started to enjoy it. I sort of kept the habit up during the first few months of junior year, when the weather was nice and I could run outside, but I stopped running once it got too cold to run outside. And on one of those first “false spring” days in February 2024, I went for a run, starting to prepare for the Big House 5K that a bunch of my friends and I had signed up for.

 

Then, on February 26, 2024, I broke my femur and tibia skiing during spring break. I had a 5-hour surgery, spent nearly two weeks hospitalized due to the injury and a handful of post-surgical complications, missed a month of classes, and lived in a hotel room near campus with my parents for over a month. I needed a walker for seven weeks, then I used a cane until July. I was in physical therapy from March until May, then again from October until January. I had to relearn how to do everything. At first, slightly bending my knee was impossible, as was raising my leg a few centimeters off the bed. Then, slowly, very slowly, I started to gain some strength back. Each bit of progress came much slower than I wanted it to, though, and it was mentally and physically exhausting to have to work so hard to accomplish things I used to do without thinking. 

 

I took my first non-assisted steps on April 8, 2024, but it was about a week before I could consistently hobble without my cane, at first only for short distances. I had a limp for months, one that didn’t fully go away until 2025. Throughout my entire recovery process, my goal was always to “get back to normal.” For me, that’s the ability to lead a fairly active lifestyle. I like to work out, to play basketball and football with my friends, and now, to go for runs. It took longer than my doctors and physical therapists expected to get me back to that point, and certainly longer than I wanted to wait, but I kept pushing. Despite my frustration with the length of my recovery, I knew the only way to speed up the process was to keep working hard. 

 

And then, over winter break, I started to feel like I was getting back to normal. So, in the hallway of my friend’s house after doing my physical therapy exercises, I decided to try to run. I was successful enough, even if calling it running is generous and my form was so awkward I couldn’t even be sure I was actually running. But I was doing it. And after over 10 months, that was huge for me.

 

That’s when I decided, although I think in reality I had subconsciously made this decision long before, that I wasn’t just going to “get back to normal.” I was going to fully recover and go beyond that. I wanted to get stronger and faster than I had been at any previous point in my life.

​

I wanted to reach a state of physical health where I could do any reasonable activity with ease. So I decided to put my focus on the Big House 5K. I’ve run many 5Ks before; after all, the 3.1-mile race is what high school cross country is. But this 5K just means something very different for me. It means all the hard work, all of the pain and uncertainty and difficulty I’ve experienced and the sacrifices my family and I have made since February 2024 will have been worth it if I can truly feel normal again. I’m intentionally not setting a goal of running this race faster than I’ve run a 5K before for two reasons. One, I don’t actually know my personal best, so I’d have to do some guessing. Two, I don’t want to risk setting myself up for disappointment if I’m not able to achieve said personal best. But I do want the race to feel easy, and I want it to be faster than I would have been able to run it last year before my injury. So welcome to my journey of relearning how to run, how to trust my body, and how to persevere.