The recovery running club: off the hospital bed, onto the marathon course

At the finish area of the city marathon there is an odd running club. Their pace is the slowest in the field. Their equipment is the most complete in the field: knee braces, kinesiology tape, medicine rattling in the waist packs. Their banner carries four characters: Recovery Running Club.

The club was founded five years ago by Old Mo, who had been a two-hundred-pound middle-aged man with high blood pressure, high blood sugar and high cholesterol, and whom a heart attack nearly carried off. The exercise prescription he left the hospital with was one line: start with walking. In the rehabilitation ward he met Old Ji, who had a new knee; A-Hui, recovering from thyroid surgery; and Da Peng, relearning his body after a stroke. The four of them paced that corridor together, from holding the wall to not holding it, from five hundred meters to five kilometers.

On the day he was discharged Old Mo made a proposal. "Let's keep each other company. Keep each other honest. Keep taking the walking course." That is how the club began. It has one rule: nobody competes on pace, everybody competes on showing up.

In the first year the goal was modest enough to be funny. Show up every day. Meet in the park, walk forty minutes, rain or shine. Three months in, walking had turned into walking with stretches of jogging. A year in, Old Mo finished the first five kilometers of his life. What he posted was not a time but a follow-up ECG report, with the caption: "All normal. A gift from running."

In the second year someone proposed entering the marathon's mini race, the five-kilometer. The club argued about it for a week. The objectors said, "We're patients, don't push our luck." The supporters said, "We're patients, which is exactly why the body needs to be told that it can." Old Mo made the call. Enter, and add a new rule: training builds gradually, everyone gets a physical before the race, and whosever body speaks up, we listen. That year all eight of them finished. Crossing the line, A-Hui cried. "Three years ago I was lying on an operating table, certain the word 'run' had nothing to do with me for the rest of my life."

People who get off a hospital bed and run a marathon are not competing for a time. They are running the identity of "patient" off themselves, one step at a time.

In the third year the club signed up for the half marathon. This time they trained for ten straight months. Monthly mileage climbed in small increments, and the members who were doctors and physiotherapists took turns giving talks on rest, load and warning signs. On race day they were the last team across the line: three hours and forty minutes, two hours behind the winner. But as they came in, the staff at the finish applauded as a group, the announcer introduced the Recovery Running Club by name, and the crowd along the barriers cheered.

Today the club has more than forty members. Half are ordinary people who had never run. Half are survivors of one illness or another. One member is an emergency physician who volunteers as team medic, and his catchphrase is: "Exercise is good medicine, but take it as prescribed." Because of him the club has an iron rule. The physical comes first, the training conversation comes second.

Someone asked Old Mo whether recovering people running marathons is not too much of a strain. He pointed at the banner. "We're not showing off. The doctors pulled us off the bed. Our job is to turn a life of being alive into a life that is lived. Running is our method." Then he added the club's best-known line, which is Da Peng's.

"The hospital bed taught me fear. The running path taught me that fear can be run off, one step at a time."