Have you ever looked at an old photograph of yourself, or read something or looked at something you created years prior, and felt so detached from it that the subject or the creator might well have been someone else?

Lord knows I have, and ironically this blog is a 150,000-word testament to that concept, but that’s not what prompted me to dust off the ol’ WordPress login and put pen to virtual paper. The “something” I created years prior was, in its essence, four numbers and a punctuation mark.

Two hundred and twenty-two point two. That number has lived rent-free in my head for almost three years now.

As I’ve mentioned briefly in these long-neglected pages, and in more detail over on my other long-dormant-but-not-as-long-as-here publication, the shuttering of gyms and pretty much all other indoor venues over the spring and summer of 2020 unexpectedly turned me into a long-distance runner. I have so much imposter syndrome about calling myself “a runner” that I literally just had to google to see what the definition of “long-distance running” was; turns out it’s any distance longer than 3 kilometers.

Anyway, being unable to go to the gym combined with being physically incapable of riding a bicycle, my options for fitness during those early Covid-19 months was restricted to “taking a walk after work.” Eventually those afternoon walks weren’t doing enough to meet the arbitrary exercise goals my Apple Watch imposed on me, so I started jogging to raise my heart rate a bit. Turns out I wasn’t very good at it!

Hard as I tried, I couldn’t run for more than a half-mile without stopping for a walk break and some grimacing due to aches and pains in my knees and back. I paid a visit to a physical therapist to get some relief from those maladies and, upon explaining the figurative wall I’d hit in my introduction to running at the tender age of 34, she gave me some advice on my form that she promised would feel strange but would pay off. To my surprise, the next time I put my shoes on and left the apartment for a workout, I was able to not only run consistently without any walk breaks, I finished a 5K in under 30 minutes. From August 26, 2020 onwards, I was hooked.

Running gave me something tangible and quantifiable to focus my swirling thoughts at a time where nothing made a lot of sense. Nobody knew what was safe from a public health perspective, nobody knew when the end was going to come, and to top it all off, I had just started raising a tiny human and had absolutely no idea what I was doing or where I was going wrong. Lacing up my running shoes (as distinct from the 100 other pairs of sneakers I owned at that point) and hitting that same stretch of E. 16th Avenue made me feel like there was something where I could immediately track my improvement and have control over things like distance and pace.

I squirmed at the idea that I was “a runner” until one night when I told Alex offhand “it’s snowing but I have to get these miles in.” I went out, did the workout, came back and admitted “shit, yeah, okay I guess I’m a runner.” (For the record, I immediately fell in love with running in the snow. There are few better weather conditions for it.)

All this snowballed — no pun intended — from “signing up for an organized 5K” to “working through an eight-week training program for a 10K” to “hey it’s winter and I’m feeling directionless so I think I’ll register for a half-marathon,” which I completed in March 2021 a little slower and less successfully than I had hoped, but I finished it nonetheless.

From there my running tapered off significantly. We were getting ready to move to Cincinnati, I was dealing with some nagging little injuries, and running had to take a back seat. I was excited to give it a shot at a lower altitude in Ohio as well as learn a new skill — running hills — which wasn’t as easily accomplished in the comparably flat Denver streets. But once I got there, the hot and humid summer joined forces with those hills and the continuation of those little injuries to ensure my running shoes rarely made it out of the hall closet.

By the time the weather cooled down, I had somewhat successfully fought through a leaky disc in my lower back that was the result of me trying to carry a rolled-up area rug up the stairs by myself, and I found myself getting a few miles a week again and rebuilding some momentum. But one Thursday night in mid-February of 2022, too cold and wet out to run on the road, I had an hourlong run on the schedule and Alex was going away that weekend so this was my last chance to do it. I went to the gym, lumbered through 5.86 miles in 61 minutes at 10’25” pace, stretched well after my cooldown…and didn’t run for exactly 51 weeks after.

My back injury degraded after that workout and, two months later, I went under the knife for a far left lateral discectomy. It was largely my idea rather than my doctor’s; he had recommended another steroidal painkilling injection, but I was operating under the fantastical assumption that I was right on the cusp of getting a new job and wanted to get this all cleared up before I lost my existing insurance coverage. Thirty-five years old and volunteering for surgical intervention. What a dumbass.

The surgeon’s team said I’d have a six-week recovery period, at which point I could get back to exercising. At the six-week check-in, and then again at the 12-week check-in, I was still in considerable pain and could barely walk let alone run, and the surgeon’s assistant told me to temper my expectations because I may never run on the road without injury again. Given how far I had gone from the summer of 2020 to the spring of 2021, and how much I relied on running not just for my physical fitness but for my mental health, this was gutting to hear.

Once the roads started to dry up in early 2023, I tried to get back out there, but my body just wasn’t ready for the rigors of repeated pounding of the pavement. No matter what I did, no matter how well I stretched, it was taking me longer to recover and I physically never felt “neutral.” You ever get sick or have a toothache or something and think “I wish I could go back to when I didn’t feel like this, I’ll never take feeling fine for granted again?” And then as soon as you’re well again you immediately go back to “taking feeling fine for granted” because we’re largely forgetful creatures. Anyway, there was never a point where my body felt fine. Every time I managed to string one or two runs together in a week, I’d hear “this is your comeback” in my head, and then I’d have to begrudgingly walk that back once I’d started hurting again. Don’t call it a comeback.

I logged 44.53 miles in 2023, across 21 workouts at a sluggish 10’13” pace, and I started walking more for exercise. Late last year I finally admitted to myself how badly I needed to run, and how the only way to do that sustainably was to build from the ground up, making my body strong enough to withstand the repetitive impact that it was inevitably (hopefully) going to be doing. I returned to physical therapy, explained my goal of being able to run again, and asked for help. I felt like a charlatan telling the PT about my running background, even though I’d spent far fewer months as “a runner” over the past three years than I had not running at all.

I’ve never been real good at doing the at-home exercises that physical therapists throughout my life have prescribed, which is probably why I keep having to see physical therapists. But this time I stuck with it, day after teeth-clenching day, until she finally cleared me to start doing light jog/walk interval workouts on a treadmill. I dutifully did those for a couple weeks, resisting the urge to open the throttle and run like my brain remembered I could, and then she gave me the green light to taper off the intervals and run.

I started in late March, then started logging my runs in the Nike Run Club app again in April, and I’ve slowly but surely run myself back to somewhere near where I used to be. I signed up for a 5K in May and was disappointed by my race, knowing I had better in me, then ran a better training 5K the following weekend by myself. I immediately rolled into a 10K program, which tested the hell out of my physical strength even when I knew what I was capable of mentally.

About seven weeks into the program I ran a pair of shoes to retirement and, in the process, gave myself a gnarly blister on my instep. The summer had arrived anyway and it was a tough sell to be outside in 80s-degree weather pounding the hot pavement. But on a whim I registered for an organized 10K on September 29, my 39th birthday, in Boulder, and once August rolled around I knew I had to knuckle down if I was to run 6.2 miles in nine weeks for the first time in three years.

Training in the August heat was rough, and I took to getting up before 6am to squeeze in long runs in the dark and cooler weather before work. Before long the 14th annual Rhode Island Seafood Festival rolled around, which took a week and a half out of my available training time (between working in Providence and recovering for days afterwards), and suddenly I had three weeks to race day. I was nervous to have lost a couple weeks of conditioning, but I skipped forward in the program, lined myself up a couple of long runs, and pushed forward.

The Sunday before the race, I was out the door before 5:30am to make sure I had optimal conditions to get 6.2 miles done before the world woke up. And I was out the door in pouring rain. I’d already mapped out my route, and at this point I had to make sure I could run the distance, so out I went. Despite the rain it was the perfect temperature out, and I felt like nothing could stop me.

Until I hit the corner of Colorado and 26th. As I stopped and waited for a gap in traffic across the six-lane road, I hit the button on my watch to pause the workout. I thought with the wet screen my finger wouldn’t register, so I hit it again but accidentally stopped the whole thing. On the Nike Run Club’s audio-guided coaching workouts, there’s no way to start where you left off, so I had ostensibly stopped after 1.89 miles of the 6.2. After shouting “fuck!” two or three times, outside a house of worship no less, I shrugged it off, started a fresh run on my watch, and headed on out down my pre-planned route

I came home soaking wet, shoes full of water and feet all pruny from being wet for an hour. I ran 10’06” pace, which slower than I wanted to be but faster than I expected, and despite stepping in a huge puddle on 17th Avenue and being splashed by a car running down the parkway, it was the most fun I’ve had running maybe ever. About halfway down 17th Avenue Parkway, which was where I spent a lot of my long runs in 2020, I was taken completely aback by how good it felt. I stretched my arms out like wings, I grinned into the air, and I all but cried thinking about how they told me I might never be able to do this again.

That training 10K felt so good that I decided I didn’t care whether the race in Boulder on my birthday was any good. All I wanted to do was finish without a walk break or an injury. So imagine my surprise when I came down the home stretch, crossed the finish line in perfect sync with the audio coaching (which never happens), grabbed a water and checked my watch to find I’d shaved 18 seconds per mile off my pace from a week prior, even with a walk break up a heartbreaker of a hill before the final turn.

Halfway through that race marked my 200th mile of the year, which put the number at the beginning of this piece, 222.2, firmly within reach. The 10K was a couple weeks ago now, and I’ve kept up my training momentum, so I ran down most of those 22.2 remaining miles pretty quickly. On Thursday morning, needing 1.8 miles to break the 2021 target, I went out for a prescribed “1,000-second run.” I knew that would equate to around 1.8, and sure enough, when I pulled up at the end of that workout, I’d done it.

If you had told me at any point between March 2022 and March 2024 that I would not only be back to running regularly but racking up more miles at 39 years of age with far more responsibilities than I did at 35, I would’ve laughed in your face.

But here I am. I figured out how to participate in the sport I love in a sustainable way, four years later and at a physical disadvantage from the last time I could run.

I think I’m ready to call it a comeback now.