Lightning's Inspiration

Almost three years ago, I was sitting with my brother on his deck, built outside the third story on the back of his house in Kentucky. It was Memorial Day weekend of 2007 and the leaves of the trees were full, and the grass way down below was crisp and deep bluish-green. At that height, we were literally up in the trees, and we felt like kids hanging out in a tree house. We were both enjoying a cool libation, as our dad used to call them. It was a cool breezy afternoon of relaxation and fun after a morning round of golf…the preferred sport of our family for 3 generations. I and my family were up visiting from Memphis to celebrate the holiday weekend, and the Confirmation of my nephew Drew.

"Are you doing any kind of exercise," he asked me.

"Nope, just don’t have the time," I responded. "I'm going to 6:15 Mass every morning, and then back to the house for breakfast and then off to work. I am involved in…such and such I went on for a few minutes…" All the while I'm explaining how incredibly busy I am, I'm thinking: What a crock! You're too busy to exercise for 30 minutes a day…you don't have one half hour you could spend in physical activity? Booshwa…again a favorite term of our father's.

"Me neither," he said casually as he sipped a cold Budweiser and looked out into the eye-level birds singing, perched high in the tree tops.

I was approaching my 49th birthday and I was as heavy as I had ever been in my life. In fact, just prior to the trip to Kentucky I had gone to the department store to get some new shorts. I knew we would be playing golf at my brother's country club, and I didn't have any nice shorts that fit my expanding waist line. My legs are particularly short, so getting a pair of 38's made me look like a college basketball player, except really dorky. As I looked in the mirror in the dressing room as I tried on pair after pair, I looked like Tim Conway's character "Dorf."

All of the nice shorts, the real golf shorts, that fit me in the waist looked more like ballooned-out capris on me. They hung about 2 or 3 inches below my knee caps and were baggy as clown pants. My hairy white legs looked like dirty toothpicks sticking out of whiskey barrels. I couldn't bear the thought of walking through Mike's clubhouse looking like Ronald McDonald' caddy. I finally found a pair that had a shorter inseam, and fit around the waist ok, but they weren't really golf shorts. They were more of a sad hybrid of golf shorts and hiking shorts. The back pocket, which was just a patch of fabric sewn to the back of the shorts, fastened with Velcro. The only proper place for Velcro on a golf course is on a golf glove, not on a gentleman's pants. And worst of all, they had an elastic waist band. Oh the humility. It had come to this: as I was approaching AARP membership status, I was also adding elastic waist band pants with Velcro fastened faux pockets to my wardrobe to accommodate my expanding waist line. And yet, I was too busy to exercise.

For much of the remainder of the weekend and the drive home to Memphis, I was haunted by my own words, my own pathetic excuses for not having enough time to exercise. And then a few weeks later, I was shocked into a new sobering and devastating reality. I was slowly walking down a long staircase in a loose fitting golf shirt. From the corner of my eye, I glimpsed myself in horror as I stepped down and down and down the stairs in agonizingly slow-motion; and there they were. How had they gone so undetected by me up to this point in my life? Why hadn't someone said something to me? My wife? My kids? A close confidant? Granted, it's not something nice people say to other nice people. But, someone should have told me about them before I took them out in public like that. Why hadn't someone told me: I had man-boobs -Phil Mickleson, man-boobs! The red shirt I was wearing made me look like C.J. Parker running down the beach. What happened to Mitch Buccanon? That's when I decided I better find some time to exercise.

The next day I went to a strip mall shoe store looking for a pair of walking shoes. I hated running. I had always hated running, and I had no intention of running. I would be a walker. I would log in miles and miles of happy trails, at a brisk pace and conserve my knees and legs, joints and sanity. I would be the tortoise, never the hare; and I would persevere and stay the course and walk off the pounds and get back into my 32's -without elastic waist bands. I picked out a nice, rugged looking pair of New Balance 473's. They were light and cushioned and I liked the blue and gray colors; really great reasons to buy a pair of shoes, right? Well, at that time I sure thought that was the way to buy shoes.

Did I mention, I really hated running? I had tried it before, going all the way back to high school when Frank Shorter, and Dave Wottle were making headlines from the Olympics. But back then, I ran too far too fast, and my muscles burned like molten lava pits for a week. I was so sore, I walked gingerly around school, unable to bend my knees or hip joints; I looked like I had crapped in my pants. I tried running a couple times again over the course of the years...even did a 10K but mostly walked that...but same soreness always happened, except brutal pounding and shaking of my frame was added to the list. It just wasn't for me…at least it wasn't for me the way I was doing it.

And then, one day -one bright and sunny summer, early evening, I was out about half way on my daily brisk walk. Clouds started to gather on the north east horizon. Big zeppelin shaped clouds rolled over head, and an unfamiliar chill entered the breeze…unfamiliar for that time of year anyway. And then my moment of inspiration for giving running another try happened: Lightning. In the distance, lots of lightning and much rain and maybe even hail to follow. I was a mile from my house, and so the 473's instinctively picked up the pace. I started to jog, and then I was no longer a distinguished British gentleman out for an evening stroll, I was Eric Liddell of Chariots of Fire, and I was hauling ass back to the house. And as I'm running, I'm thinking: "hey this isn't so bad. I'm not being jarred like I remember, like an old jeep driving down a dry rock strewn river bed. This is kind of enjoyable." I got home, out of breath and much more sweaty than usual, but not electrocuted, not hail stung, not drenched from the coming downpour. But, I was kind of high. I was feeling pretty darn good. My first runner's high. And then the real miracle happened. The next day, I was not overly sore! I did not have the crap walk. I actually felt pretty good.

This event started me down the pathway of running which I have maintained with joy, and wonderment, and strains and pains to this day. I graduated from walking to running and thus joined the brotherhood and sisterhood of running, all because of a bolt of lightning on a summer evening almost 3 years ago.

Of the many, many things I have taken from the experience of running, maybe the one most important is: you don't have time for exercise, you have to make time for it.



I still resemble Dorf, or at least Tim Conway's "old man," who shuffles along, when I run. But for me, that's ok. I'm out there running, every week and loving it to death. I follow John Bingham, "The Penguin," and Jeff Galloway, the proponent of run-walking. I'll never get to the Boston Marathon as a participant. But again, that's ok with me. I'll waddle along, as long as I can; enjoying the sport I have come to love, even now that I do have my AARP membership. I have taken to heart John's slogan: "The miracle isn't that I finished, the miracle is that I had the courage to start." So as John also tells us all, "Waddle on," Friends.