Run. Because zombies will eat the untrained ones first!
~Heather Dakota, Zombie Apocalypse Survival Guide
Three times a week, my husband forces me to meet him in town after work and pretend to be chased by zombies. Or maybe it was my idea. The details are fuzzy.
We are actually preparing for a community 5K held every year in our town to raise money for those battling cancer. As 45-year-olds who are overweight and incredibly out of shape, with me recovering from two major surgeries last year, I’m not really sure why we don’t just write a check and help hand out water bottles or something. That seems like the practical, logical thing to do. But then I suppose we wouldn’t get the T-shirt.
This all started when we flew to the West Coast and spent a week with our two-year-old grandson. When we returned, we realized that if we didn’t do something soon, we would never be able to keep up with that child. There’s a reason we had our children in our twenties, but we’re still young enough that following a toddler around the playground should not be so exhausting. So we returned to the East Coast, took a nap, and started a 5K training program.
We are using an app for couch-to-5K training. The idea is that anyone can run if they work into it slowly. This particular app has a story line involving zombies to help make the training a bit more interesting. Because, let’s face it, running is hard and boring. The really nice — or really horrible, depending on the day — thing about this app is that it incorporates additional exercises such as knee lifts or heel lifts to strengthen our legs. So not only can our muscles scream in pain from running, but they can be stretched out to feel pain in different ways!
Advil is now a staple on my grocery list. After the first week, my husband, suffering from horrible shin-splint pain, bought special “shin-splint socks.” These are a real thing. He realized a week later that he should have read the instructions when he found out that he was wearing them backwards. When I pictured our empty-nest years, this was not quite what I had envisioned.
Then around week four, something amazing happened. I jogged five minutes straight without stopping. For most people, that won’t sound like much. I’m not even comfortable calling it running at this point. But I was definitely jogging.
For me, it was a major accomplishment considering my past history. For the past few years, my iron was so low that I could barely walk across a room without being out of breath. Even after surgery to fix my iron issues, walking was still difficult. Then I tore the meniscus in my knee. The surgery to repair the tear was not, as I had hoped, an instantaneous fix. The recovery took months, not the three days I had allotted it on my calendar. I had thought the doctor was just being super cautious, but he actually meant it when he said it would take six months to a year to stop swelling and hurting so much. Mid-forties bodies, especially those not well taken care of, do not recover like 20-year-old bodies.
But, eight months after the first surgery and six months after the second, I’m jogging. Five minutes is not going to get me through a 5K, and I don’t see how three more weeks will get me to a point of running for 40 minutes straight, but right now I’m just happy to jog five minutes straight. For a woman who could hardly walk across a room last year, that’s a big step.
So, to recap, three times a week, a very overweight, out-of-shape, middle-aged couple meets in town to pretend to be chased by zombies along a historic canal path so they can pay $25 for a “free” T-shirt later this summer. And one of them has his socks on backwards.
— Heather Truckenmiller —