My story on how a car crash enabled me to run a marathon

I know I know, the title almost sounds like a cliché. It’s true nonetheless. This article won’t go through theoretical arguments why it’s true. It will tell you a story. My story.

It was a cold December morning in the year 2011. I was driving my motor scooter to school. After passing a foggy valley I arrived at a junction that would take me on a main road leading, to the town my school was located in. Two cars were in front of me, waiting at the stop sign. They started driving, I followed and just had a quick glance to the left. This is the last thing I can remember until seeing the faces of my parents that night in the intensive care station of the hospital. What they told me is that a car hit me with 50 km per hour and that I had multiple fractured bones in my left leg as well as a severe concussion. They didn’t need to tell me the latter actually because I noticed the concussion every time I moved my head more than an inch. I stayed for one and a half weeks in the hospital and had multiple surgeries. Luckily, Christmas was approaching and they let me go home a bit earlier than they would have during a normal period. So I was back at home on walking aids the 23rd of December. Generally I recovered pretty well and could walk without the walking aids prior to the prescribed 3 months. After 3 more months I was allowed to play football again. So just in time for the last season in the junior team of my club that I was really looking forward to. We had an awesome coach and a really good team spirit so I was eager to play.

On the first day of training we started with some easy running drills. For me this was already the end of my training and of my hopes to play again in the team, at least for a while. My coach told me to please stop because it already hurt him seeing me running. I was in severe pain and the running I did was more of a limping. Even while walking I limped a bit and for running it was extreme. I got home and was super frustrated. But this, one of my lowest points of the journey, was the turning point. I checked again with the doctors if it was problematic that I was in intense pain while running and they told me that it’s normal to feel that pain because my whole body needed to get used to running again but that everything was stable and I couldn’t do any damage. So I made the commitment that I would start running no matter how much it hurt. The first day I started with 25 meters of running away from my house and then walking back. The next day I did 30 meters and of running and 30 meters walking back. The next 50 meters of running and 50 meters of walking back. This might sound easy but I was in intense pain every time I took a step but in this case my stubbornness was really a major help to follow through with this. Fast forward a few months and I was in the shape of my life. I could run for 18 kilometers straight and this in a pace that I couldn’t have held over 3 km before my injury.

Not only was I fitter than ever before but I enjoyed the process of running and improving so much. Actually for the first time in my life I enjoyed running. I would even say I felt in love with running. I tried running multiple times before for various reasons. From becoming fitter for football, to loosing weight. But it always went the same way. I set out to run 7-8km, started out way to fast felt good for the first 500 meters, somehow managed to continue running for 2500 meters more with increasing pain in my legs. Around 3 km I couldn’t bare it anymore and hated myself and running for a while. But through the injury I was forced to run slowly. I came to realize that this running at a slow pace was actually pretty enjoyable. Not at first since, I still had this pain on every step thing but the more I ran the less pain I had from the injury and the more I enjoyed it. I enjoyed how well I could think while running. I enjoyed how much progress I made and how much better I got very quickly.

After my peak in the winter of 2012 I led my running training slip for a while. I started to play football again in my team and then had to undergo surgery again to get some metal parts out of my legs that were stabilizing my bone but weren’t needed anymore. This meant 2 weeks on walking aids again and 4 weeks without running. At that point, though, I was already addicted to doing lots of sports. So it wasn’t an option to sit idle for a whole month. So I started to hit the gym. I am kind of an easy gainer, in terms of muscle mass, so I quickly gained a lot of weight, which didn’t help football nor running.

I still ran occasionally but not with the same dedication as I did after the injury. This should change though when a few friends from uni told me that they will compete in the local half marathon. So I took running again a bit more seriously. That year, I finished my first half marathon with 2:11h the next year 1in 1:56h, the year after that in 2018 I finished my first marathon in 4:10h.

So in the end, the worst injury of my life , led to the biggest sportive achievement in my life a new years down the road. Of course having bad fortune in life still sucks and even after learning this lesson I am not happy to have bad fortune it still sucks for me as well. But this lesson helps me to make it suck a bit less and reframe my perspective on it. Maybe this story will also help you to gain a different perspective on your own bad fortune and make it suck a bit less.