Day Two

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On August 14, 2022, I went for my first run. It was Day One of Couch to 5K.

My daughter had started running marathons, and I wanted to understand something about this thing she loved. I had absolutely no intention of becoming a marathon runner myself. I was a competitive swimmer through college. Always athletic. Never a runner. I thought maybe I could learn to run three miles.

That seemed plenty ambitious for this Pisces.

So I downloaded the app, put on my shoes, and headed out for Day One.

And then I got hit from behind by a bicycle.

I was running on a sidewalk in Seattle when a teenager on a bike came up behind me. He had apparently moved from the road to the sidewalk because he was texting while riding and thought the sidewalk would be safer.

It was not. For either of us.

He hit me when I was mid-stride and I flew forward with tremendous velocity. I had the presence of mind to realize I could lose all of my teeth, so I tucked my chin in and curled my head down. I remember a jolt, and then silence. When I opened my eyes, there was a giant puddle of blood on the pavement in front of me. The dog was sitting perfectly still, just staring at me.

I remember looking at the spreading pool of blood and having the surprisingly matter-of-fact thought:

This is not how I thought I would go.

Fortunately, I wasn't dying. Faces just bleed a lot.

A couple of very nice moms walking with their children came over and gave me a bag of wipes. I cleaned myself up as best I could, got my dog, and walked more than two miles back to my car looking, I learned when I got to the car mirror, like I had just left a murder scene.

Across those two miles, almost no one stopped me to see if I was okay. That remains one of the stranger details of this entire story.

I drove home. I took a shower. Then I took myself to urgent care.

I had cracked my skull and my nose. The kindest doctor on the planet spent hours picking debris out of my skin from a variety of locations and did everything he could, as kindly as he could, before he sent me to the emergency room for scans.

What I thought would be a few days of bruising turned into years of recovery: physical therapy, retraining my balance, rebuilding strength, learning to walk normally again, and adapting to changes I had never anticipated when I pressed START on a Couch to 5K app that summer morning.

Meanwhile, on that exact same day, my husband, my daughter, and my son were hiking the Enchantments, an area of Washington State known for its immense beauty. More than twenty miles of elevation and rough terrain, exposed to the sun for long stretches. They left before sunrise and did not get back to the car until after sunset. Difficult is an understatement. It's the kind of hike where preparation matters considerably. (There is some ongoing discussion about whether everybody on the hike that day was actually as prepared as they should have been, if you catch my drift.) But they all made it out uninjured.

In a heartbeat, my daughter developed a theory about this: I had taken the family's vicarious injury. Everyone else got home safely because apparently, I had volunteered to absorb the day's entire injury allotment on a simple sidewalk in West Seattle.

I'm not sure this is how gravity works, but I would rather faceplant all day long than have any of them hurt, so it really didn't faze me. Happy to take one for the team.

There was something else about that day that stayed with me. Lying on that pavement had delivered a message with unusual clarity:

We have much less control over how life unfolds than we like to believe.

I had learned a version of this lesson in many horrible ways, many horrible times over the course of my life, but never by getting my head slammed into cement.

I didn't immediately turn that realization into some inspirational transformation. Quite the opposite. I went way down before I came back up. Recovery changed my life in ways I couldn't have understood that day.

But somewhere during those years, something else remained. My daughter kept running. And I kept watching her. Marathons. Half marathons. 10Ks. 5Ks. Training. Discipline. One foot in front of the other.

I went to New York to cheer her on for the New York City Marathon. I will never forget what it felt like to stand there and cheer for thousands of people running past me. Every single one of them made an imprint on me. Almost as much as the runners, the spirit of people from all over the world gathering across this beautiful city in a massive show of positivity is almost impossible to explain in words.

Standing in the front row of the final stretch bleachers, watching her cross the finish line, sealed it for me. What my daughter had called my vicarious injury became something else to me.

Vicarious inspiration.

On January 22, 2026, I opened Couch to 5K again. And I did Day Two.

Three years, five months, and eight days had passed since Day One.

There is something almost ridiculous about seeing those two things written next to each other.

Day One.

Three years, five months, eight days.

Day Two.

We tend to have a very particular picture of progress. Day One should be followed by Day Two. Then Day Three. Keep going. Build momentum. Don't break the streak. We celebrate consistency because consistency works.

But life doesn't always cooperate with our preferred trajectory. Sometimes there are three and a half years between two consecutive steps.

And the second step still counts.

I didn't tell my daughter I was learning to run. I did not tell anyone. I just followed the app. Run a little. Walk a little. Run again.

I made one decision very early: I wasn't going to fight the process. I wasn't going to prove anything. I was going to do the amount of running I could do that day, and then I was going to come back and do it again. Little bits would add up. That was the whole strategy.

At the beginning of every run, the app posted a greeting I initially thought was a tad ridiculous. Then I realized it was exactly what I needed, but I needed to say it to myself. So at the start of every run, regardless of who was around us, I would look down at my dog and say to both of us:

Hello, amazing runner!

This was objectively generous.

Week One went surprisingly well, which led me to conclude that the whole enterprise was perhaps most definitely maybe possible.

Then Week Two arrived and the app changed the game. Running got hard real fast.

I adapted a mantra from women's running: 261 No Fear, a nod to Kathrine Switzer's historic Boston Marathon bib number. When doubt showed up, I would stretch my arms out, make 2-6-1 with my fingers, pretend to zip the fear up through my body, pull my fist over my head, and throw the whole thing into Lake Washington.

It was possibly ridiculous.

It also worked.

I kept going.

That was also the week my husband figured out I was up to something. I haltingly admitted I was trying to learn to run to surprise our daughter. He agreed to keep my secret and became my private cheerleader.

On Week Three, I went back for the first time to the road where the whole thing had started. I walked for about two miles, organizing my breathing to try to regulate my nervous system. I said "Hello Amazing Runner, 261 No Fear" on repeat. I came to the street, turned the corner, and started my run. I was afraid. I was fighting to stay present. I wanted to feel my feet run right through that space. It is a long road. I ran toward the spot with all that fear and memory, desire and dread.

And that run brought back a sentence I've thought about many times since:

Let what's easy be easy, and let what's hard be hard.

It's a common coaching phrase. I can't remember where I first heard it, but I've used it on hard hikes, and it came back to me in that moment, and I'm so grateful it did.

And that is what got me across the few feet I had flown across that last time, but this time, I landed on my feet instead of my face.

Let what's easy be easy, and let what's hard be hard.

We waste an enormous amount of energy doing the opposite. We make easy things complicated because we don't trust easy. And we resist hard things because we think their difficulty means something has gone wrong.

Sometimes easy is allowed to be easy. Sometimes hard is simply hard.

Keep moving.

By Week Four, I discovered that my running outfits could match my shoes and realized there might be future shopping opportunities associated with this new identity.

Week Five brought bugs up my nose. Very offensive. Very common. Or so I'm told.

On Week Six, I decided to work on intentional exhaling and spit on myself instead.

Running, it turns out, is deeply undignified.

And still: Hello, amazing runner.

On March 8, 2026, I asked my daughter to meet me at the reservoir in Central Park and to wear what she normally wears for light exercise. For her, I figured this would be more like a little skip around the pond. For me, it would be monumental.

She didn't know why.

I had made us T-shirts. FACEPLANT TO 5K.

I had also learned that two laps around the reservoir would get us to 5K. I made a playlist. And then I told her the story she didn't know.

I stood at the bottom of the steps that led up to the reservoir and gave her the speech of a lifetime. I told her about August 14, 2022. About starting Couch to 5K because of her. About January 22. About the secret training. About the bugs. About spitting on myself. About learning to let easy be easy and hard be hard. And about all the ways I had watched her put one foot in front of the other.

I told her that what she had once thought of as my vicarious injury had become something entirely different. She had become my vicarious inspiration.

And then I invited my marathon-running daughter to run my first 5K with me.

I did offer one important disclaimer. I had no idea how fast I could run. I had intentionally stayed off Strava because I couldn't figure out how to hide myself there, and I wasn't particularly interested in publishing my slog to the world. So I warned her: for me, this might be running. For you, it may be a walk.

She came anyway.

We ran. We danced and ran and crunched gravel side by side.

We finished.

And it was one of the most joyful runs of my life.

I'm adding mileage and learning how to run longer. I've moved on to the Nike Run Club app, and Coach Bennett has now talked me through 90-minute runs, 60-minute runs, five-mile runs, two-and-a-half-mile runs, and all sorts of distances I once would have found fully impossible to even imagine. I still dance while I'm running if the music moves me, even in public.

And I do something else now, too.

I think about those two miles I walked after the accident and how many people passed me without asking if I was okay. So now, when I pass another runner, I try to give them something. A smile. A high five. A woot woot. A you've got this. Occasionally a good ol' fashioned yeehaw.

It turns out there is science behind this. Encouragement and social support can change how effort is experienced, and research on exercise and running suggests that encouragement can improve performance, motivation, and the experience of the effort itself. In other words, cheering for others compounds and grows.

I love that.

A tiny signal between two people moving in opposite directions can change something about the next few steps.

Maybe theirs. Maybe mine. Probably both. So I cheer. And almost every time, someone smiles and cheers back.

I still have no intention of running a marathon. I'm also still not a particularly impressive runner. Nobody sees me coming down the trail and thinks, "There goes an elite athlete." I have work left to do on my health and strength.

I am slow. Some days I slog. Some days everything clicks. Some days my feet hurt. Sometimes I'm surprised by what my body can do.

But somewhere along the way, I stopped requiring myself to be good at running, because running good enough is still running.

That idea has become so important to me that I've started calling it the Mehathon. Not everything has to be a marathon. Not every effort has to be exceptional. Not every metric has to impress somebody else.

Sometimes the accomplishment is that you moved.

And moving forward is moving.

I've spent much of my professional life thinking about systems, change, improvement, resilience, and what allows people and organizations to become something they aren't yet. We love dramatic transformation. The turnaround. The launch. The breakthrough. The heroic leader. The giant leap.

But I think we overestimate the importance of intensity and underestimate the importance of return.

Can the person come back tomorrow? Can the team try again? Can the organization retain what it learned when progress gets interrupted? Can the system accommodate a bad day, a disruption, an injury, a change in leadership, a loss of capacity, without treating everything that came before it as wasted?

Maybe resilience isn't the ability to keep moving without interruption. Maybe resilience includes preserving a pathway back.

Because sometimes Day Two comes the next morning. And sometimes Day Two comes three years, five months, and eight days later.

It still counts.

That has changed how I think about the accident, too. I don't believe everything happens for a reason. And I don't need to turn getting hit by a bicycle into a gift. I wouldn't choose the injury. I wouldn't choose the years it took from me.

But I do get to choose what I carry forward from it.

The woman who stood up from that sidewalk in 2022 was tough because she could walk two miles back to her car, literally a bloody, broken mess. She was a bit of a bad arse.

But I understand strength differently now. There is the strength required to push through. And there is the strength required to rebuild. To begin again. To accept today's capacity without mistaking it for your permanent capacity. To do something badly for long enough to get better at it. To let what's easy be easy. To let what's hard be hard. To keep putting one foot in front of the other even when no one else would look at what you're doing and call it impressive.

I am stronger now. Not because I've regained strength I lost. Some of it has come back differently. Deeper, maybe. Less about proving what I can endure and more about trusting what I can build.

My daughter taught me something about that before I knew she was teaching me. She leaned forward. She put one foot in front of the other. And she ran on.

Eventually, I did too.

And that's what Harvest the Signal is all about.

Forward doesn't have a pace requirement. It doesn't require an unbroken streak. It doesn't require anyone watching. And it doesn't require a running app, but I do love them.

Sometimes forward is a marathon. Sometimes it's a Mehathon. And sometimes the bravest evidence that something is still moving is simply this:

Day One.

Day Two.

Whatever comes next.

The question I'll leave you with is this: where in your life or work might you be mistaking an interruption for an ending?

And yes, I made T-shirts for that. Get yours at the link below and join the Mehathon crew. No mileage required. Just forward. Or as I like to say, "Somehow...you kept going anyway. 26.2 miles. In the time it took."

Grab a T-Shirt and get your high fives on…

Seen this pattern where you work? Hit reply and tell me. That's the harvest.

Want a bit more? Listen on Spotify or Apple for One More Signal about this topic.