What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

Two years ago, my dad died.

I found out via email. The notification from my cousin, who lived across the country, came up on the right-hand corner of the screen, the subject line reading “Condolences.” It was an unavoidable flag as I finished up an online hiring assessment critical to a job application I had to fill out because I had just been laid off a few days earlier.

I didn’t have to read the contents to know they were about my father, a man I had last seen lying in a hospital bed after suffering two back-to-back heart attacks two years prior, when he found my half-brother dead in his ex-wife’s home. My entire family had known it happened before I did, before my siblings ever thought about telling me. And now it had happened again. 

My muscles tensed as I continued with my assessment and told my husband sitting beside me, “My dad died.”

It took my partner closing the lid of my laptop for me to fully realize what had happened. That the man I had grown up without, who called me on my eighteenth birthday to tell me my favorite uncle was dead and that I was a horrible daughter, who hadn’t called me since I was twenty-seven years old, was gone. He never told me he loved me. He never told me he was proud of me. He never said he was sorry for hitting my mother or leaving me. Now he never would.

You’d think I wouldn’t be sad about it. After all, what use is there crying over spilled milk?  It’s not like I knew him. It’s not like he knew me. My memories of him are painted hazy and filtered through the lens of time: getting my hair cut at the barbershop; eating ice cream as we walked down the hill to our apartment building when I got stung by a bee and he had to carry me back home in his arms; staying at his apartment in the Dominican Republic and having to ask him to take me to the supermarket because I had just gotten my period; eating at Coogan’s every few weeks because it was close to his senior living home. Each memory has years of silence between them. Gaps of time where he was just a voice on the other end of the phone or missing altogether. I grew up resenting my mother for standing up to him and getting rid of the only person I thought loved me. I resented him for being such a terrible person that my mother had to stand up to him to survive. Most of all, I resented myself. For being so unlovable that my parents couldn’t stomach me enough to put their weapons aside and provide the love a young child needed and deserved.

So how could I be consumed by so much grief for someone who never grieved losing me?

I dealt with it like I do all things. Laughing about it. Two hours after finding out, I texted friends the news with the additional note, “He was a month away from turning 101 and he couldn’t make it? Loser ass behavior.” I continued applying to jobs. My partner put on movie after movie in an effort to distract me, not realizing each film featured a dead dad. It was good for me, because I could cry through the laughter.

When the jobs weren’t replying and my mother’s response to the news was a “If I have to say something, I guess it’s rest in peace,” instead of asking me how I was doing, I decided I could no longer stay inside my house, trapped with my thoughts. I was on sub with a book no one wanted about a girl with dead parents trying to find her place in the world. I was as unmoored and alone as she was, and I had to find a fucking distraction.

So I started running again.

I had been running on-and-off for a few months. Three to four miles in 90-degree weather, but only because I needed to add cardio to my exercise routine. Now, I couldn’t pay for the gym because my job had decided I was superfluous, and I couldn’t work out in the garage without getting heat stroke. That first day, I ran four miles. And then the next week I started running six to nine miles every single day, trying to outlast the demons chasing me.

The pain started almost immediately.

I ignored it for weeks, until a running friend told me to invest in running shoes. It helped, but every so often, a twinge started in my knee that I ignored with the same fervor I used to ignore my father’s death, allowing it to only affect me when I sat there seething about the way Bella Swan treated her dad Charlie while I jokingly muttered, “Man, I wish I had a dad,” before bursting into tears.

Eventually, the months passed. I kept running every day. My friend advised I look into structuring my runs. I found a running program for a half-marathon and thought that would do, since I was running nine miles a day with knee pain that had become a constant companion I could depend on.

I don’t know what possessed me and my partner to sign me up for a marathon. I wasn’t training for one. I had no intention of doing one. I didn’t even like running. But two months before the 2024 Austin Marathon, my partner entered my name and paid for registration, so I ramped up my training while I worked a new corporate job I hated.

There’s no need to detail the training, or how I felt about the marathon as it slowly drew closer. I don’t remember much, no doubt a coping mechanism I developed while I ignored everything going on around me. What matters is that I stopped running right after the marathon.

It wasn’t that I stopped grieving my father’s death. Sometimes, I still burst into tears remembering there would never be an opportunity for him to change. To make things right. To be the dad I so desperately wanted. I stopped because the pain in my knee and lower back became too pronounced. Every running session ended with me limping home. I went back to strict strength training, determined to build the muscles around my knees and glutes to withstand running again.

I got stronger. I lost weight. I sold a book. I felt that running would be a breeze. One afternoon, after a two-mile walk, I decided to run the last mile home.

And felt terrible.

The knee pain was miniscule compared to the searing back pain. I couldn’t sit. I couldn’t stand. Every position I put my body in hurt. I couldn’t train without feeling my insides pinch. The pain grew worse. I did more stretching, more lifting. I went to Colombia for a little writing retreat slash girl’s trip, convinced that so long as I took it easy, it wouldn’t get worse.

My back gave out.

The pain was unbearable. My angel of a friend called her ex-husband, a man in med-sales, to ask what she should do. I spent an entire week in my mother’s homeland bedridden and eating fast food, unable to take a step without feeling pain. My body was a prison I couldn’t escape.

When I got home and saw an orthopedist—not a spine guy like I called him—he confirmed what I had googled late at night in Colombia, while the show Ghosts played in the background. I had degenerative disc disease. My disc had degenerated enough where there was nothing left. My running away from my problems—my grief, my feelings, my demons—had given me a much worse one to contend with. I was too young for surgery. I was given a physical therapy script and sent home. I couldn’t exercise the way I had been. No more back loading, no more deadlifting, no more running. I had to take it easy. My lifestyle would have to change.

My days at the gym were spent lifting light weights and trying not to strain my back. I got stronger again. For three glorious months, I improved. My father’s death was a thing I got to put to the back of my mind, and when I mentioned him, I no longer felt my eyes sting with tears.

Until I turned thirty-five and decided that I was no longer injured. Two years had gone by since that email, and I was fine. I got on a hip thrust machine and went heavy. Too heavy. And knew immediately I had made a great mistake.

For four days, my back slowly tensed up. I couldn’t bend over. Couldn’t pick up after my dog. Couldn’t unload the dishwasher without groaning in pain. Monday morning before dawn, I woke up needing to use the bathroom. I slowly got out of bed and felt a pain like nothing else I had ever experienced. I shuffled toward the bathroom, lost my balance, made a sound that startled my partner awake, and promptly passed out in his arms.

The ER doctor sent me home with baby doses of pain meds that did nothing to alleviate the sharp pain that sent me to the emergency room in the first place. All I got from the experience was the doctor’s impressed voice as he said, “This is the most severe degenerative disc disease I’ve seen in someone your age.”

Today is the anniversary of my father’s death. I’m a week and a half out, and can finally stand without having to wait for my back to stop spasming. I went to the orthopedist and got a prescription of steroids and muscle relaxants and another script for PT that I’ll actually use this time. But I sit here, forced to confront the demons. The feelings. The grief I had tried to outrun, and find they’ve been there all along. My father’s last terrible, shitty gift for me was the slow disintegration of my spinal column and lifelong chronic pain. I didn’t escape his death unscathed. It was another mark he got to leave on me, another wound I would spend the rest of my life trying to plaster over, wondering what I had done to deserve it.

It might be unfair to blame him for something I did to myself, but I find that I’m back to being that little six-year-old girl he left behind in New York City. Desperate for her father to save her. To whisk her away to the Dominican Republic. To tell her he’ll never leave. Knowing without a doubt that he always will. That no matter how fast I run toward him, he will never let me catch him.