Taking health care into our own hands

Call it a minor miracle. I was recently at the Town of Hempstead’s Newbridge Road Park pool in Bellmore, swimming with my kids. Gingerly, I began stroking across the main pool, employing the front crawl. I didn’t believe I could reach the other end without stopping.

Two years ago, I could barely swim, not because I didn’t know how, but because I was out of shape. I splashed around and made a decent show of it, but I couldn’t do much more. Last summer was better. I could make it a quarter of the way down the pool, and with great effort, halfway. So, this year, I didn’t expect that I could reach the other end nonstop, but I figured I’d try.

A funny thing happened on my way from one end to the other. I was not out of breath, and I made it across. I felt like a kid at that special moment when, all at once, you can ride a bicycle after having fallen many, many times.

Much to my surprise –– and delight –– I could swim across not once, but many times. By week’s end, I had swum a quarter-mile, with little rest between laps. What had happened to me, a soon-to-be-45-year-old husband and father of two?

If you read this column regularly, you know that I started running again in June 2010 after a decade-long hiatus. I increased my mileage slowly until I ran the 5K Robbie’s Run in Merrick this April, finishing the course in 23 minutes, 20 seconds, and placing 90th in a field of 1,200 competitors. In running, I’m doing what I believed was impossible not long ago –– I’m resetting my biological clock to a time when I was younger and healthier.

I knew that I had to act when I reached 42, was overweight and would get out of breath climbing stairs. But I didn’t believe that I could once again feel healthy enough –– be healthy enough — to run races as I did in school. I had resigned myself to the safe comfort of the sedentary lifestyle that our society expects of middle-aged people like me.

But I didn’t want to just sit on the couch, beverage in hand, watching younger people play sports through my TV for the rest of my life. I wanted to play. It wasn’t a mid-life crisis. It was simply a desire to be the person who I always was before I reached age 30.