The father’s first run turns an ambitious effort at self-improvement into a sharply physical setback: after years of walking, he sets off in new running shoes and, within an hour, is found injured in the woods. The episode is both comic and tender, but its details resist reducing his body to a punchline. The new shoes fit him properly for the first time, the run briefly gives him a sense of what his body can do, and a misjudged jump leaves him dependent on a stranger and his family to get home. Afterwards, running survives chiefly as reading, planning, and a name he gives his injury.

Preparation and Expectations

The run follows the father’s decision to lose weight through a steak diet. While the rest of the family continues to eat its favorite kinds of offal, he is served a large steak for lunch and eats cucumbers instead of supper. He has also stopped smoking. After obtaining books about running, he and the narrator go to the town’s only sports shop, where the father buys running clothes and shoes. He has long believed that his shoe size is forty-three; the salesperson finds that even size forty-four is too small, and he buys size forty-five only after being assured that running shoes run exceptionally small.

He keeps the shoes on to break them in, as his books recommend. At a meal in their favorite grill, he reflects that they may be the first shoes he has ever bought that actually fit. He had assumed that a shoe should press slightly against the foot, and the narrator offers an explanation that the father likes and repeats: a comfortable shoe is soon forgotten, while discomfort keeps it in mind. The exchange gives the episode an early, wry connection between bodily comfort and memory. Before he has even run, the father’s understanding of his own body has been challenged by the simple fact of a correctly fitting shoe.

The First Run and the Search

On the following Sunday, the father begins his training. The woods lie directly across a road from the psychiatric grounds. He warms up on the terrace, hopping in place and stretching, while his sons watch through a large window. He insists that they stay behind because he does not want to make a fool of himself in front of his fit, well-built sons. The narrator follows him only as far as the road. The father has difficulty judging how fast cars are moving and often waits until the road seems empty before crossing; even then, he takes the narrator’s hand firmly and hurries across. This familiar caution contrasts with the confidence of setting out alone to run.

After the father disappears into the woods, the narrator returns to the house and reads about lightning melted into fragile, jagged crystals beneath desert sand. The father’s absence gradually interrupts that reading. After half an hour, the narrator’s mother wonders whether he should have run for so long at the outset; after three-quarters of an hour, another family member asks where he is. When an hour has passed, the family goes looking for him and brings the dog. The narrator’s eldest brother tries to make the dog follow the scent of one of the father’s socks, but the mother snatches the sock away, sharply telling him to stop.

The searchers follow winding woodland paths to a straight main track leading towards the castle. There, about three hundred metres away, the father is sitting on a bench at the side of the path, hunched over with his head hanging. His hands are dirty, as is one knee, and the dog licks blood from his shin. The family’s anxious search ends not with him returning triumphant from a run but with the sight of him injured and unable to get up.

The Fall and the Journey Home

The father explains that he started well and was surprised to discover that he could run at all: for years he had walked and had not run. He intended only to cover the long path. Because it was going well, he decided to add a gentle acceleration over the final ten metres, following the advice in his running books. At a place where rainwater had washed a groove into the path, he tried to jump across. He was briefly airborne, but landed in the channel and twisted his ankle. He heard it crack and could not stand again.

An older woman with a walking stick helped him up. The details make the injury a meeting between the father’s carefully studied plan and the uneven ground on which he tries to carry it out. He has followed the experts’ advice about pacing, yet a small, specific feature of the path defeats the attempt. His account also makes clear that he was not simply discovered by his family: a stranger had already pulled him to his feet, and he had needed to hold on to her stick.

The walk back is slow, with frequent pauses. The father asks the narrator to remove his shoe and sock. His ankle is badly swollen and blue; the narrator’s second-oldest brother describes its color as resembling an aubergine. The father asks the family not to tell anyone and proposes that the injury remain their little secret. The request gives the scene an intimate, almost conspiratorial ending, but the ankle’s visible condition and the family’s help make the injury impossible to keep private within the household.

Aftermath and Significance

During the following weeks, the father continues reading his running books with his leg raised and explains training plans for returning to exercise after sports injuries. He takes pride in calling his torn ligament a sports injury. The phrase preserves a connection to the activity that hurt him: the failed run becomes evidence not only of an accident but of having tried to become a runner. He also buys books about marathon history and tells the narrator stories about Paavo Nurmi and Emil Zatopek, known as the Locomotive from Prague.

The effort has different outcomes in different parts of his life. The steak diet works better: for several years he weighs about ninety-five kilograms, and he does not smoke again until a later, memorable event. The running shoes, however, have a brief life as running shoes. Although they fit him so well, he never wears them for another run; across their entire running life they cover no more than three hundred metres. The episode therefore ends in a split between successful and abandoned change. A new diet becomes a lasting, if temporary, alteration in his habits; the attempt to run leaves behind books, plans, stories, and shoes scarcely used.

As a remembered childhood scene, the episode is shaped by the narrator’s movement between watching and witnessing. At first, he observes his father from behind glass and then waits at home with a book; later, he joins the search and sees the blood on his father’s shin and the swollen ankle. The physical injury supplies the episode’s reversal, while its small particulars—the size-forty-five shoes, the rain-cut groove, the stranger’s walking stick, and the three-hundred-metre total—keep the father’s aspiration grounded in an imperfect body and a particular place. The attempt ends quickly, but its aftermath continues in the father’s new vocabulary, reading, and stories.