Tag Archives: marathon

Marathons

26 Sunday Oct 2014

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imagesA bit more than year ago I made a deal with Pádraig that he would try really hard to get better and I would try really hard to run the 2013 Dublin Marathon. We both kept the deal and our promises. He tried really hard and I did too.

Then in May of this year, we made a similar deal. This time it was the Hamburg Marathon.

Tomorrow, it will be the third deal for us, and, as with the previous deals, I am sure he will keep his end of the bargain as will I. We will both try very hard.

I told him that I’m ready to do this running lark for as long as it takes – but that I wouldn’t be disappointed too much if tomorrow was the last run of our deal, just in case it turned out that he was going to take a few really big steps towards getting better.

As it happens, tomorrow, it will be 16 months to the day that this 4.3 ton van hit him on what we now know has been a well-know deadly strip of a country road for cyclists and pedestrians – so narrow that a cyclist and a truck do not fit beside each other in one lane, so deadly that they are now investing US$6m to make it safer.

I told Pádraig that I will be running in the company of giants: friends without whom he’d never had got as far as he did, without whom I’d long have been drowned by these relentless tsunamis hitting us for now 16 months.

Someone once told us that this was no sprint, that it was a marathon. They never mentioned that it was not just one, but a whole marathon series.

We’ll keep going. Making deals. Trying really hard. Moving.

Eventually we’ll get there (it’s not about the time it takes, it’s about finishing) – knowing that if we stumble on the way, there will be someone there to help us up. And that makes all the difference!

Thank you to all who wished us well for tomorrow! Good luck to all who’ll be running!

Principles

20 Sunday Jul 2014

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When you google ‘principles’, you Principlesget something like “The six principles of…” or “The ten principles of…”. I have no idea how many principles I would like to see as the guiding ones for the care of young people with severe brain injury, but I know that some are definitely needed. So I am going to give it a go and just start, not knowing where it will end up. I’ll do it over time and would be more than happy to hear from you about what you think:

What should be the guiding principles for the care of young people with severe brain injury?

Give me some ideas. I will start putting them together from tomorrow.

This weekend was, like other weekends, quiet. Pádraig is getting used to having the speech valve for most of the day now. Not only is his body dealing really well with the extra effort he has to make with the speech valve (great oxygen levels with no need for extra oxygen and no need for suctioning, really relaxed heart beat), but he also makes a real effort to get his voice back again. At the moment there is a lot of guess work necessary to ‘understand’ him, and we can’t really be sure about what he is ‘saying’, but we have now doubt that he is trying to say things at times. It is a question of time, for him to get used again to have a voice and be able to use it, and for us to understand better what he is trying to communicate.

Communication, however, continues to work when he is using his tongue and feet movement (right foot/tongue movement = yes, left foot/tongue movement = no). A sure sign that he is really there is that I have observed a very clear threshold with him for stupid questions. We keep telling him that the questions we are asking are just for practice and that they are all pretty obvious – but there are questions he just does just not engage with, like the one I asked him today (to get a ‘yes’ response): “Am I here?” I suppose, at that stage I wasn’t really sure myself to which degree I was there; and he probably thought “well, if he has to ask questions like that, he’ll have to think about the answer himself!”
fingal-10k

10k Swords. The second race in the Dublin race series leading up to the Dublin City Marathon on 27 October, in 98 days. I didn’t make it but know that at least one very good friend of Pádraig’s, who is preparing for October (although she doesn’t know it yet:), took part and did really well!

Screen Shot 2014-07-20 at 16.06.23Leinster Open Sea Swimming are organising a “Swim for Pádraig Schäler (Caring for Pádraig fund)” – the original date had to be changed. The swim will now take place on Saturday 9th August on Killiney Beach. The men’s race will start at 12.01pm and the ladies at 1.00pm. The course will be set at around 1,400 metres. The really good news is that the “Swim for Pádraig” swim will now count as a qualifier for the 95th Dublin City Liffey Swim on 13 September (see current calendar here).

Today’s Music Tip
Glashaus, Wenn das Liebe ist.
What’s hot
Principles
What’s cold
Temperatures of up to 36 degrees in Hamburg
The German word/phrase/verse of the day
Wo ein Wille ist, ist auch ein Weg.