Here is the essay I wrote that won second place in Massasoit Community College's One Book, One College writing contest. The prompt was to write about a story that is told within your family and how it has influenced your life. Enjoy!
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It seems that I hear or ponder the story of my father's recovery from shattering his foot every day, and I know I experience the aftereffects every minute. There is a reason that my siblings and I are as healthy, strong, and hardworking as we are today, and it all started one day with a devastating injury. Whenever I feel inadequate, incapable, or incompetent, my dad reminds me of his journey.
My dad has always been an extremely active person. He played football all through high school, has cycled over one hundred miles, races motocross, and participates in Olympic- and Half-Iron Man-distance triathlons. Endurance exercise is his idea of fun. Therefore, when he shattered the bones in his foot back in 2004, he was devastated. Being an athlete, of course, he's more prone than the average person to injuries such as these. He had broken his wrists, tailbone, ankles, and even his pelvis before—but this one was different. After a tough search, he managed to find a specialized surgeon who said he would need to lodge a permanent titanium plate and seven screws in his foot. "Here's the deal," the doctor said. "We're going to do our best to reconstruct your foot so you can walk again, hopefully without any devices, but there are no guarantees. You'll likely have a limp for the rest of your life, and you'll certainly never run again." My dad knew the surgery was his only hope for being able to get out of bed and off his crutches, so he agreed to go through with the procedure.
After the surgery and eighteen months of physical therapy, he could walk again, but with the addition of the promised limp and support from a dozen Motrin capsules per day for eight years. Because of his condition and his inability to keep up with his normal exercise regimen, his health gradually declined and he fell into bouts of depression. He always describes the fall of 2008 as his lowest point. He was missing out on many milestones in his three children's lives, was becoming extremely overweight, and had developed Metabolic Syndrome (a common precursor to diabetes). When his physician warned him that if his blood pressure and sugar levels didn't improve within six months, he would be forced on additional medication, my dad decided that enough was enough.
My dad spent the next four years working with a personal trainer, during which he began to study the facts behind nutrition and endurance sports. When, after every attempt to curb his blood sugar, it still didn't drop low enough, he kept digging deeper until he discovered something called the ketogenic diet. Ketosis is a state of the body in which it is processing stored fats for energy instead of sugars and carbohydrates. After many trial runs, my dad learned that by consistently eating fats in place of grains, starches, and sugary foods, he could lose weight faster and last longer in athletic events. Then, being our father, he passed his knowledge on to me and my siblings. Thanks to him and his journey, our overall health, endurance, and athleticism have also seen great improvement, even if we're not quite as strict and self-disciplined as he is. But my dad didn't stop there. Now that all of his issues, including the painful, everyday inflammation in his foot, had been so noticeably lessened, a question arose in his mind—would he now be able to run again?
One day in early spring of 2013, my dad experienced one of the most pivotal moments of his life. He has described this particular part of the story in such detail that I could never forget it. On his way home from work, he noticed dark clouds beginning to appear in the sky and, predicting that it would soon begin to rain heavily, decided to grab the mail from our mailbox before going inside. After parking his truck and walking across the street, however, he realized he was a few seconds too late. The clouds opened up and rain began pouring down on him. Without even giving it a second thought, he grabbed the mail, slammed the box shut, and sprinted back into the house.
"It took me another few steps before what just happened hit me," he says. He had just run painlessly for the first time in almost ten years. He recounted this experience in a post on his blog, writing that "to the average person, running to seek shelter from a pouring rain is nothing out of the ordinary...but to [him], this was a mind-bending moment." For nearly the entire past decade, even mere walking had caused him pain to the point of misery. Running had been completely out of the question. I remember when we used to play at family softball games, and he would purposely try to hit a grand slam over the fence every time he was up at bat, because his only chance of getting around the bases was to slowly walk them. I remember him being forced to participate in relay versions of triathlons—he could bike and swim just fine, but then he would longingly watch a teammate from the sidelines as he or she completed the running section in his place. I remember watching him sit down on a couch and ice his foot at the end of a day of walking around Disney World, not understanding as a young child just how much agony he was experiencing—but then everything began to change.
My dad dashed through 2013—literally. He began running almost every day and completed his first full triathlons. After each of them, he recounted parts of his story for us again and again. His doctor had said he would never run again. He had believed it. And yet, here he was. By 2014, he was running ten miles at a time. In 2015, he completed a Half-Iron Man triathlon, which includes a 13.1-mile run. And later that year, after noticing that one of his business clients was looking for runners for their charity, he set his sights on the Boston Marathon.
It was during this leg of the journey that I really began to listen to him and fully understand his story. I watched him train every Sunday, riding my bike alongside him as he ran, holding his water bottle as he progressed from fifteen miles to twenty to twenty-five each week leading up to the race. The experience was incredible. This guy had gone from being bedridden with a shattered foot, always forced to the sidelines, to running and completing the 2016 Boston Marathon. Every member of my family knows his story, young and old, even if they weren't directly involved in it. This story has shaped all of our perceptions of what is truly possible to accomplish. We have all been inspired by my dad to strive to achieve any goal we have—athletic or otherwise—despite our impediments. He has taught us all by retelling his tale again and again that we can overcome anything to which we set our minds, even if it goes against all odds.
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