This Book Changed My Life

I grew up playing basketball. I played until Zoe was born, and then several things happened that made me stop. For one, I usually played after work, but that has become prime family time. For another, I blew out my knee. I finally got my knee fixed, though that didn’t do anything to remove the scheduling difficulty. So once I started exercising again, I mostly just ran.

I’d been running for a long time, but I treated running pretty much the same way I treated basketball. If you didn’t do it hard, you weren’t really doing it. So I’d run two, three, maybe four miles, going pretty much all out. And all the while, my back was tight. I tried starting that up again this spring, and I just couldn’t do it. I had trouble breathing, and I just wasn’t getting my stamina back. Four weeks after I’d started running, I wasn’t really doing better.

So I did what anybody who has trouble in some part of their life does: I bought something. I went to my local running store and bought a new pair of shoes. While I was paying for them, I asked the guy who sold them to me about where I can find info on interval training, and he said I should check out Jack Daniels. In fact, I’d come across that name before while I was googling intervals, but I thought that a big alcohol maker had put some crap on the web, seeking to rebrand their particular toxin as part of an “active lifestyle.”

After I came back from the store, I bought this book.

And it has changed my life. For some reason, it’s managed to convince me of the truth of things that people around me had been saying for years: easy running and recovery runs are important parts of your training, and a whole bunch of other things. I’m actually running faster than I used to, my stamina is improving every week, and my back no longer hurts. That last one is the real biggie. I only realized recently that every time I had to sneeze, I’d brace myself because the shock would give me back pain. Now, I don’t have to worry about it anymore. I can sit at my desk all day and still get up at the end. Amazing.