The Beginning

Around 7 years ago, when I was in my mid-30s, my life was in free fall. I’ve always been a virtuoso of terrible decision-making (it’s a niche talent), but somehow I’d managed to wrangle myself into a position in which the following things were all true simultaneously:

I was going through a divorce that felt like a slow-motion flaying with my husband of 14 years, who was also the father of my two tween children.

The separation/divorce was (predictably) wrecking those kids and they were a disaster.

I was homeless and mostly staying in the basement room of my friends Mark and Lori.

I was 50 pounds overweight and lacked the stamina to walk more than a couple of miles.

I was underemployed at a job at which I made about $29,000 a year because I had brilliantly put both my education and my career development on hold to put my husband through graduate school, not once, not twice, but three times (virtuoso at bad decision-making, remember?).

In the midst of this dumpster fire, my friend Lori, in whose basement I was staying, had a terrible idea. “You should try running,” she said, with the persistent enthusiasm of the naturally athletic. “I think you would really like it.”

Lori is a lifelong runner with a perfect physique. She is tall and lithe and graceful, with long legs and a rapid metabolism. Like other athletes, she is convinced that running is a good solution for everyone. I was more than a little skeptical.

But I was also desperate. I wasn’t sleeping and anxiety was eating my digestive tract. My mind was a damaged vinyl record that was playing at full volume, except where the scratches made it screech, skip, and glitch.

I might as well try running, I figured.

I had a pair of tennis shoes and some comfy pants, which I guessed was good enough, and an MP3 player which had music on it. There was a relatively flat stretch of road near Mark and Lori’s house, and I figured that would work for the thing I was optimistically calling a “run.”

I found the “Couch to 5k” program, which is designed for people as hopeless as I was. The very first workout has you run for a minute at a time, with lengthy walking intervals.

One. Minute.

60 seconds.

That first minute of running was among the most physically unpleasant of my life, and felt like a solid hour. I gasped and flailed and choked, blood filled my face, my thighs burned, my stomach hurt, and, implausibly, my shoulders cramped. I felt like a sausage having a heart attack. A huge fist closed around my lungs and my vision grew blotchy. I was going to die on the side of the road in Birmingham, Alabama, running more slowly than the average nonagenarian; I was nearly certain.

My timer beeped. I staggered to a walk, gasping like a landed fish. That was objectively awful. Running was a nightmare; it was a form of torture invented by the worst sort of sadists.

Except, as I walked and gradually let my heart rate settle back into a safe range, I realized something important: For that awful, horrible minute, I had been able to think nothing but, Breathe. I hadn’t fixated on a single one of my problems. My mind had been completely, blessedly, blank. It was like being handed a pearl necklace wrapped in a dirty diaper.

If you had told me then, I would not have believed you. But that was the beginning of the story.