This extra chapter was cut from The Journey Back to keep the book focused. The physical paperback is $12.95 with free U.S. shipping. Any $17 PDF-and-audiobook bundle is a separate optional digital add-on, not the price of the paperback.
Shortly after the diabetes diagnosis, Alen and I were talking about everything that had happened.
He told me, ‘Dude, you need to document all of this.’
I thought about it and told him, ‘Dude, you have a point.’
The idea of a comeback and a journey became clearer more recently, after the documentation had begun accumulating. I want to preserve that timeline honestly. Alen urged me to record the process early. The larger meaning of what I had recorded emerged over time.
At that moment, I could barely exercise for ten minutes in an air-conditioned building without feeling as if I were going to die.
Today, I can run 3.8 miles in 92-degree heat.
That sounds like an enormous jump when those two scenes are placed beside each other.
The strange truth is that it did not happen through one enormous act.
It happened because I made an enormous decision, then began filling the distance with ordinary acts.
When I came home from the hospital, my mother had just died. I had a wife I absolutely loved. I had my daughter, Jill, my son, Alex, and friends who meant the world to me. I had people to care for and people who cared for me.
I remember thinking that I had not come this far to stop now.
Then I made a decision that did not make much sense if you judged it by the condition of the man making it.
I decided I was going to complete a triathlon.
Charles and triathlon did not exactly sound as if they belonged in the same sentence.
I could not run.
I could barely survive ten minutes on a treadmill.
I could ride a bicycle, but I was nowhere near race condition.
I could not swim.
That last obstacle remains delightfully inconvenient.
But I was not choosing the goal because it matched my current abilities. I chose it because it was difficult. Very few people complete a triathlon, and I wanted to do something that required a fundamentally different version of me.
First, I wanted to complete a sprint triathlon.
Then I wanted to move to the Olympic distance.
After that, a half Ironman.
Eventually, I wanted to complete a full Ironman.
Anyone looking at me as I left the hospital would have had a reasonable response: ‘Let us slow down. The immediate goal is keeping you alive and getting you stable.’
They would not have been wrong.
My medical care, medication, nutrition, blood-pressure management, and gradual recovery had to come first. A triathlon could not replace any of those things.
But I also needed a horizon beyond merely avoiding another emergency.
I needed to picture a life that was larger than surviving.
I did not choose a triathlon because it fit the man leaving the hospital.
I chose it because it required me to become someone that man could not yet imagine.
In a way, the first piece of that future had arrived before the diagnosis.
Several months before the hospital, around June, Alen had helped me find a Cannondale road bike.
It is an older aluminum race bike. I joke that the bike is old enough to vote, but it is still fast. The previous owner had raced it, and it had been kept in remarkable condition.
It had pink handlebar tape, which made it even better because pink is one of my favorite colors.
Alen and I went to pick it up together. The entire thing felt like an extraordinary gift.
Before that bike, I had ridden mountain bikes and BMX-style bikes. I had never owned a true road-racing machine. The first time I rode the Cannondale, I understood that it was built for an entirely different purpose.
It wanted to go.
The bike had arrived before the diagnosis.
Its purpose became visible afterward.
Once I committed to the triathlon, I looked around and realized that one of the three disciplines was already sitting in my apartment.
I did not have to wait until I owned every piece of equipment or understood the entire plan. I had a bike. There was a trail behind the apartment. I could begin.
The Cannondale came with clipless pedals, which are the confusing kind that actually require shoes to clip into them. I had not learned how to use the cycling shoes yet, so I started with what I could manage.
Cycling made sense to my body.
Years earlier, during physical therapy, a small blonde therapist had looked at my build and told me, ‘You are like a T. rex.’
I asked what she meant.
She said I had a large, powerful lower body and not much of an upper body.
She was not wrong. I have a black belt in taekwondo, so years of kicking had built my legs. Cycling allowed me to use strength that was still there while rebuilding the aerobic engine around it.
But the actual beginning was even simpler than the bike.
Alex and I walked.
During the winter, we would leave the apartment and walk to Park Road Shopping Center and back. The round trip might take forty or fifty minutes because we were not racing. We were talking.
We walked and chitchatted about life.
Those walks did not look like triathlon training.
They were.
They taught my body to remain in motion. They gave me time with my son. They transformed exercise from a punishment into something connected with conversation and family.
Eventually, I began taking those walks by myself too.
Alen and I returned to the gym and started lifting weights. I knew strength training belonged in the larger plan, but I was also trying to create an aerobic base. I needed to teach my heart, lungs, and muscles that movement was going to become normal again.
Then I started riding the Cannondale more consistently.
I loved it.
A bicycle lets you cover enough ground to see the world change around you. You can move quickly, explore, and still feel every hill, turn, and shift in the air.
At heart, I may still be a twelve-year-old boy who wants to see how fast the bike can go.
Over time, I reached the point where I could ride approximately twenty miles in the morning before work. I could wake around seven, get on the trail, complete the ride, and return to begin the day.
The person who had struggled through ten treadmill minutes was building an engine.
Then the bike reminded me that enthusiasm and skill are not the same thing.
One morning, I came flying through Freedom Park. Fortunately, nobody else was in my path. I was riding fast when the edge of the narrow tire drifted into the seam between the concrete and the grass.
The tire caught.
The bicycle stopped going in the direction I intended.
I did not.
The bike flipped, and I went down hard.
I was bleeding from my knees and other scraped areas. For a while, I simply lay there. Then I used water to clean myself as well as I could, gathered the bike, and made my way back to the apartment.
At one point, I considered riding to the hospital and asking whether someone could put me back together.
Instead, I went home.
Cleaning the dirt out of the wounds was miserable. I bought a small mountain of bandages. I received a tetanus shot and was given antibiotic treatment. A clinician told me that one of the deep gashes might benefit from stitches.
My needle phobia helped me decline that suggestion with remarkable efficiency.
The wound has taken close to two months to heal, and the fall did more than damage my skin.
It damaged some of my confidence on the bike.
That is hard for me to admit because the crash was my fault. The Cannondale had not failed. I had been riding too fast for the margin I gave myself.
I have taken that bicycle to approximately twenty-seven miles per hour. At that speed, on a bike with narrow twenty-three-millimeter tires, there is very little between the rider and the pavement except judgment, equipment, and a helmet.
I enjoy the speed.
The crash taught me to respect it.
For a while, my knees were bandaged and so stiff with scabs that bending them was difficult. The discipline I loved most was suddenly less available, and I did not feel as confident getting back on the bike.
But the decision to become an athlete had already been made.
The crash could interrupt one route without cancelling the destination.
Around that time, Brandy took me to Fleet Feet and bought me properly fitted running shoes. I told the woman helping us that I planned to complete a triathlon and that I had not really run in approximately thirty years.
Brandy gave her a look that suggested she should not encourage me too enthusiastically.
I understood my wife’s concern. My history does not suggest that I am naturally gifted at moderation.
But I now had shoes selected for my feet, and running gave me another way to keep moving while I rebuilt trust on the bicycle.
A couple of weeks ago, while I was near the country club in Charleston, I began with intervals.
I would walk, then jog for approximately thirty seconds. I would walk for several minutes, then jog again.
It was not elegant.
It did not need to be.
I repeated the session.
Then I began extending the running portions.
My friend Will has a college background in physical training, and he warned me, ‘Charles, take it easy. Try to increase only about ten percent a week.’
I thought that sounded like wonderful advice for everybody else.
Apparently, some habits survive a metabolic crisis.
On the day of the 3.8-mile session, I started with walking to warm up. Then I alternated approximately one minute of running with three minutes of walking and continued for an hour.
I covered exactly 3.8 miles.
That does not mean I ran every step. The session was a deliberate mixture of running and walking. The accomplishment was that I stayed in motion for the full hour and covered the distance.
I had moved from being overwhelmed by ten minutes indoors to completing an hour outside.
Brandy had also given me a COROS watch, which I believe is a PACE 3, as an anniversary gift. I configured it so she could see when I was exercising and where I was going.
That feature mattered for more than performance tracking.
I did not want to disappear on a trail or roadside while my family wondered where I was. The watch gave Brandy another way to know that I was active and safe.
The gift carried a message: she wanted me healthy, and she wanted me home.
That is the part of this transformation that a training log cannot measure.
Alen helped me preserve the evidence before we fully understood the journey it would describe.
Alex walked beside me when walking was the training.
Brandy placed the right shoes on my feet and a watch on my wrist.
Will tried to keep my ambition from outrunning my tissues.
My family and friends did not complete the miles for me, but they helped make the miles possible.
Ultimately, however, I still had to decide.
That is the least complicated and most important answer I can give.
I decided I was going to become healthy.
I decided I was going to become an athlete again.
I decided I was going to complete a triathlon even though I could not yet run, was still learning the road bike, and could not swim.
Nothing mystical happened at the moment of decision. My aerobic capacity did not instantly change. The treadmill did not become easier. The pool did not teach me to swim while I slept.
The decision changed what the next ordinary action meant.
A walk with Alex was no longer only a walk.
It was part of triathlon training.
A morning ride was no longer recreation alone.
It was building the engine.
A pair of properly fitted shoes was no longer just footwear.
It was equipment for the person I had decided to become.
Even the crash became information rather than a final answer. It told me that speed required skill, margins, awareness, and respect. It did not tell me to surrender the larger goal.
I would love to say that I followed a flawless progression plan from ten minutes to 3.8 miles.
I did not.
My tendency is to push. I can hear good advice about gradual progression and immediately imagine that I am the exception. That is the same exemption problem I had confronted with my health.
The safer truth is that a person coming out of a serious medical event should build gradually, use appropriate equipment, and work with qualified medical and training professionals. Determination does not make connective tissue, cardiovascular risk, heat, traffic, or pavement disappear.
My commitment is worth preserving.
So is my body.
The goal is not to prove that I can suffer more than everyone else. The goal is to arrive at the starting line capable of reaching the finish.
I am still learning that distinction.
I am not yet the triathlete I intend to become.
I still have to build the running volume responsibly. I have to restore my confidence and develop greater skill on the bike. I have to learn how to swim.
That is not an asterisk beside the dream.
That is the journey.
The moment I realized I was no longer the same man who had left the hospital was not necessarily one dramatic workout.
It was seeing the evidence accumulate.
Ten minutes became forty-minute walks.
Walking became morning rides.
Morning rides became twenty miles.
A crash redirected me toward running.
Thirty-second jogs became one-minute intervals.
The intervals became an hour and 3.8 miles.
The progress did not move in a straight line, but it kept moving.
The documentation was becoming the record of a comeback.
It was becoming the record of a journey.
The first miles did not look impressive enough to announce what they would become. They looked like a father walking slowly with his son through Park Road Shopping Center.
But every difficult future begins as an unimpressive present.
I did not need to look like a triathlete before I started.
I needed to start behaving like a person who intended to become one.
Decision created the direction.
Repetition began creating the capacity.
And the people who loved me helped make sure I did not have to travel the distance alone.
Want to see how I connected the dots?
I wrote The Journey Back to share my experience and explain the Four Metabolic Loads framework. The physical paperback is $12.95 with free U.S. shipping.
→ See The Journey Back Paperback ($12.95)
Educational only, not medical advice. Charles’s experience was alongside physician-supervised care and prescribed medication. Individual results vary. Talk to your doctor.