Crazy Legs
The Half a Year of Living Slothfully
It started innocently enough. I had just run a fall marathon and took a week off running to recover. When the week was up, my leg muscles grew restless and sprung back to life. But my skin would have none of it. Severe eczema f lared angrily, from my red, peeling, irritated face down to my scaly, unfathomably itchy calves. I’ve had the condition my whole life, but unlike most people who grow out of atopic dermatitis, the medical term for the condition, my symptoms grew worse into adulthood. And as the pain, itch and discomfort escalated, my will to run (or move, for that matter) dissipated.
So I sat, I scratched, I applied various medicated ointments and I moisturized. I visited one of the top dermatologists in Canada, and waited for the eczema f lares to quiet down enough to start running again. Early morning runs were replaced with sleep-ins, or waking up at 4 a.m. to drive my daughter to swim practice. Instead of running in the evenings, I burned through every season of Game of Thrones.
After a couple of months without a single run, I realized it was my longest nonrunning streak since I started running 20 years earlier. The scariest thing was that I was starting to enjoy not running. I revelled in my laziness. Yes, the eczema made it painful to run, but it was also an excuse to become a sloth. Maybe I’ll run next week, I would say, sinking deeper into the grooves on my basement couch, stuffing my face with Chicago mix popcorn and trying to decide which episode of Chef ’s Table suited my mood that night.
Ashamed, I didn’t advertise the fact that I had stopped running. People just assumed I was still grinding out the miles. At family gatherings, relatives still served me large pieces of cake and big helpings of food, because I’ll just burn it all off on my next run anyway, right?
After three months, I had to start convincing myself that I was st ill a runner. It’s just a little break, I would say. Meanwhile, I had started a beer blog, drinking and reviewing a different Ontario craft beer every day for a year. My nights of hammering interval workouts on the track were replaced by pounding back delicious gulps of imperial stouts and double ipas. I felt pangs of guilt, but the truth is I was loving my new unhealthy life.
By five months, I really started to worry. Would I ever be able to start up again? I had been doing some bike commuting to work, and did a fair amount of walking, but my fitness and motivation to exercise was so far in the dumps, I wasn’t sure I could climb back out. All my old running habits were fading into the past. Without thinking, I used to roll out of bed in the morning, put on my running gear half-asleep and push off for a nice Sunday long run. Now, whenever possible, I became an expert at sleeping in. I had become a die-hard non-runner. My abs disappeared under a layer of fat. My legs, once ready to spring into action at any time, felt at ease in their idle state. I felt numb to my own listlessness.
But then, a breakthrough. A new medication reduced my eczema symptoms to almost normal. One day, after more than half a year of almost no running, I slowly pried myself out the butt-divot in the couch, changed into running gear, slipped on my shoes, walked out the door, took a deep breath and started to run.