Landed

I signed up for my first 100-mile race in October. A year of training behind me. A year of early mornings, long weekends, miles that added up to something.

Then my body said no.

The discomfort started small. A flicker in my leg. I took a few days off. Rode my bike. The flicker became a current. By morning, electricity filled my leg. Tingling. Numbness. A live wire I couldn’t switch off.

It never stopped.

It only got louder.

After a couple weeks of no improvement, I knew. The race was gone. A year of work, erased. I was angry. I was devastated. I turned inward. My fuse got shorter. I had nowhere to put it. So I just held it and kept lying on the couch.

For three months, my wife flew the plane alone. She kept the house running, kept our 11-month-old son alive and loved. She did the things that should have been mine.

I watched.

One night. She had just gotten Sega down. She took a shower. Got ready for bed. Finally lay down. And then he woke up. I saw it on her face. The defeat. The exhaustion. She had nothing left. But she got back up. She always got back up. I lay there and watched her go. Guilt. Shame. Love that hurt. She kept choosing to get back up.

Sega would wake in the middle of the night, and I’d hear him crying, and I’d lie there. I could walk to his room. I could stand beside the crib. But I couldn’t pick him up.

I couldn’t do the one thing a father is supposed to do when his son cries in the dark.

I used to take him on runs in the stroller. Long walks through the neighborhood. I haven’t pushed that stroller since October.

The anxiety built for weeks. By the night before surgery, it was pressure in my chest, my jaw, my hands.

Constant pain wears your mind down. Immobility does worse.

I added a second medication somewhere in November. Then a third in December. I needed the help. I wasn’t coping. Plenty of days I felt like giving up. Not on life. Just on the idea that any of this would ever get better. I was just still here.

Some days that was the whole victory.

When you can’t move, can’t help, can’t do, you start to wonder what’s left of you. I was afraid of the answer. That maybe I was worthless. That maybe I’d never get back to who I was before. That fear visited at 2am. Some nights I believed it.

What if the surgery doesn’t work?

I wasn’t ready for that.

Then morning came.

I woke up and the pressure was gone. Not reduced. Gone. Replaced by something I didn’t build. A peace I hadn’t earned. I can only explain it one way.

People prayed. Churches. Coworkers. Friends I haven’t seen in years. I felt carried. It was uncomfortable. I’ve always been independent, and months of relying on others didn’t change that. But I had to let them carry me anyway.

My best friend arrived at 5am. Thirty years of friendship. He has an 18-month-old at home. That’s not an easy ask.

But that’s us. There for whatever. For laughs. For serious. For nothing. Thirty years means you don’t have to explain. There’s a safety in that nothing else gives you. He drove. I rode calm.

I put on the gown calm. I lay on the table calm. They rolled me into the OR, gave me oxygen. Then something in the IV. Five seconds later I opened my eyes. It was done.

The plane landed on January 2nd.

I came home the same day. I’m on the couch now, taxiing down the runway. Two weeks until work. Six weeks until I can function again. Some unknown number until I find out what running looks like on the other side.

I expected the electricity to vanish. Instead, I have back pain. Soreness from being opened up. From a surgeon pulling my spine apart to clean out the wreckage. It’s new. But there’s an end in sight. The plane is down. Now we finish the runway.

That’s what I keep telling my wife. We landed. We just have to taxi to the gate.

Maybe you’ve landed too. Or maybe you’re still in the air, wondering if the wheels will hold.

I don’t know your turbulence. What shook your cabin. Who’s flying the plane while you can’t. But the runway is real. The gate exists. Getting there is slower than you want. Harder than it looks.

Somewhere in those three months, I found the kitchen.

I started cooking. Really cooking. Not just to feed us, though it did. To create. To move my hands when my legs couldn’t carry me. A knife on a cutting board. Garlic in hot oil. Something I could make when I couldn’t do anything else.

You might find your kitchen too. The thing you didn’t know you needed. The motion that saves you when the motion you loved is gone.

The flight plan said 100 miles through the woods. I landed somewhere else. A couch. A heating pad. A wife who got back up when she had nothing left. A son I can almost pick up again. A stovetop where I learned I could still make something good.

I don’t know if I’ll run again.

The turbulence didn’t destroy the plane.

It changed where I landed.

Maybe it will for you too.