Bear with me
for a minute. I’m not a big fan of Rom-Coms
(Romantic Comedies). The plots tend to
be rote and predictable (boy meets girl, love at first sight or they hate each
other, life either gets in the way or brings them together, then happily ever
after). The exception for me is Fifty First Dates. In it Adam Sandler meets Drew Barrymore who
has a traumatic brain injury that prevents her from creating new memories.
Every day when she wakes up in her mind she is back before her accident. And
every day Adam must woo her all over again.
Running with
Parkinson’s is kind of like that. On many mornings when I get up, it feels like
my body has forgotten how to move. The muscle memory is still there but for some
reason the brain can’t seem to find it. Kind
of like Alzheimer’s for the muscles. Some days are better than others but every day
requires some level of retraining to reestablish the connection between the
brain and the muscles. That translates into a lot of warm up and spending
the first few miles reteaching the body how to move. On the best days that connection gets
reestablished but slower than an old dial up modem. It doesn’t
help that one side moves slower than the other making my running look more like
a “zombie shuffle”.
So, where
are we on the Marathon Challenge? Again
this year I’ll be leaning on my family to help me complete the distance. I haven’t recovered from last year’s
kidney/sepsis challenges but I still have a few miles left in me and running/jogging/walking
with my children and grandchildren is an inspiration for me. That, and the help I get from all of you in
supporting the children fighting cancer.
Their marathon is much more challenging than mine.
So, in two
week I’ll be out there again, this time running like a turtle.
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