Walking the Road to Somewhere

I don’t like running. Never have, despite playing soccer all through my youth. And now, as an almost 43-year old mom with someone else’s lungs in my chest cavity, running seems practically impossible (high functioning lungs = kind of critical for running, no?). There are many physical barriers on top of my already present mental barriers. I feel tightness across my chest still. My entire body suffered from a lack of oxygen for over six years and I don’t really know what the lasting effects of that are though I do know at the time, it was awful, I was in right heart failure and I lost a lot of strength. I've done short sprints maybe three times in the past two years and probably jogged a total of 300 yards.

And, as I may have mentioned, I don’t like running.

But I’m curious to see what these lungs and this body can do so I went ahead and signed up to do a half marathon in June. 

To be fair, I am only committing to run/WALKING it so I’m not trying to be Wonder Woman. I’m doing it with a group: Team Transplant at the University of Washington and today marks the beginning of the 16-week training schedule. There are five levels of starting fitness: beginning walker, advanced walker, then beginning, intermediate or advanced runner. I’m starting at beginning walker which seems pretty darned easy – the main problem with walking is it takes soooooo looooong and gets a tad boring (I’m very thankful for podcasts). I've been throwing in a few yards of jogging in my walks these past few weeks, mostly to see if I can find a pace that won’t take me five hours to make the 13.1 miles.

If anyone is interested in joining me on this spring adventure, friends and family are encouraged to be part of the transplant recipient’s team and I would love the company and support. I figure this is the natural evolution of “Team Keem” participation over the years in the various Pulmonary Hypertension walks in LA (thanks to those lovely Rebacks) and at Stanford (the Longs, Bowlings, Tryhorns and many others). Our first team walk is this Saturday at 8am at Green Lake (and most Saturdays thereafter, at locations around the area) and the kick-off breakfast is Saturday, March 7 at the Montlake Community Center. I’d be happy to send you all the information I have so you can look it over.

I'm nervous, excited and totally prepared to realize that this is not something my body is really up for…but my hope is that my body cooperates with this desire to find my physical limits and I can push Sick Kim even farther in my past.