Last Place Runner

I don’t ever ask myself why I’m running. I used to every time, every step. Now I run because I run.

I started running without knowing how. I started running in a way that was probably bad for me. And during one of those awful first runs, I realized I wasn’t running for sport. I was literally running away from and trying to outrun nearly everything happening in my life.

Jan. 31 of last year, I went to work. It was a Friday. As soon as I got there, I started wondering if I should tell my team I was leaving. I shouldn’t have worried. Just after 9 that morning, my mother called. It’s not unusual for me to communicate with her on any given day, but usually it’s an email or a text. A phone call scared me. My dad had had a heart attack and was in an ambulance. She wasn’t with him. And I was in an office building nearly four hours away. I hung up, grabbed my coat and barely managed to say, “My dad. Heart attack,” before I was out on the stairwell.

My dad had told my mother the night before that his shoulder hurt. He never came to bed. She got up the next morning, got ready for work. Because they were spending that weekend here, she asked him to drive her to work and pick her up before lunch so they could just come straight here. He was still dozing on the sofa, but he said he didn’t want to do that. So she went to work.

When he finally decided something should be done, he called her first. “I don’t feel good,” is what he said. My mother, who works at the best cardiac hospital in the state, started running. Her co-worker, a longtime family friend, thankfully had the sense to call my parents’ neighbor, who came right over to wait with my dad. By the time the first responders arrived, my uncle was there, too. My dad tried to convince the paramedics that his brother was taking him to the hospital, but nobody — especially not my uncle — wanted any part of that.

I’m letting the story get too far away from me. A few hours later, I was standing in front of my dad. He was in the ICU, but he was sitting up and talking. I knew at that point that it was a miracle. No one else has arteries like my dad had and lived to tell it. Anyone else would have been awaiting funeral arrangements. But there he was, kind of irritated that I’d made such a long drive just to sit around in a hospital. Of course, my brother and his family had come, too, and my brother said we’d had to come in case we needed to divide up my dad’s possessions. The good thing about us is that we like to make fun of ourselves.

We spent the weekend there and drove home in a snowstorm, which irritated both my parents even more. I took a couple of days off work the next week. And the week after that, we were all called into a meeting at the end of the day — it was Feb. 13 — and told that our client had decided to give our account to a different agency. We had until the end of May to find new jobs.

Over the next couple of months, I did little else but look for a job and worry about my dad. He had two procedures to clear out his arteries, the first one being completely unsuccessful. Because there was so much trauma from that attempt, his doctor had to wait four weeks to try again — this time using the big guns. It was hard to keep going to a job when there was no incentive to work, especially when I felt like I could have helped my parents in some way. But neither was willing to let me come home for my dad’s procedures.

I wasn’t having any luck finding a job, either. I was glad that I had until the end of May, but that window was closing fast. My dad finally went back to work toward the middle of March. And by the middle of April, I had lined up a 17-week freelance job that would get me through the summer.

I met my friend Amber at that job — and a lot of other really great people. We started “taking walks” every day to bitch about our nutty boss. Then we started getting together on weekends to walk the trails. Then, as that assignment was ending, I miraculously landed another short-term writing job and went seamlessly from one to the other without ever missing a day of pay.

I’ve been on that job since August, knowing it would end when the work moves to California to a new team being assembled out there. It’s been a great experience, but I assumed that I would make another seamless transition to the next great opportunity. My job ends next Friday, Jan. 30. Just one day before what I feel like was the beginning of a long, uncertain year. A year I spent running. Figuratively and literally. I’m still running in the figurative sense, and I’m still getting nowhere.

It’s been difficult this past week to have a positive outlook. I’m sure there’s some kind of clinical name for it, but I’m reliving my dad’s brush with death. I even had a dream this week that he was dead in a hospital bed, his eyes black and still in his head. I can’t understand it. He’s in good health and I see him all the time. But, even now, a year later, I am “all shook up” that he seriously could be dead and buried by now. I have tiny bouts of crying every single day.

But, I also run every day. I’m doing a One-Mile Run Club for the year and I’m right on schedule. Some days I even get ahead of schedule. It’s been something good to look forward to and never a chore. Even though I started out trying to outrun everything that plagued me, I needed desperately to take charge of myself. This long, uncertain year made me get real with myself. I’ve spent my lifetime telling myself things would be different when —-. But things weren’t different until I made them that way. And if you think changes are too hard to keep and goals are too hard to reach, you’re being unfair and maybe even cruel to yourself.

What do you want to do? What would you do if you had 20 minutes of free time every day? Does it scare you to think about it? You can start today. But call your dad first.