I spent the first two years of my life in and out of St. Luke’s Hospital. To this day, I still consider St. Luke my patron saint. That’s tongue in cheek, mostly.
When you’re a kid, you don’t know what’s supposed to be normal. You just know what is. For me, what was normal was loving soccer and dreaming of becoming a soccer star and an anthropologist. Kids have weird career aspirations. What was also normal was being severely asthmatic, though I didn’t really understand what that meant until my high school coach pulled me aside one day and told me he didn’t want me playing soccer anymore. He was concerned about my asthma.
I didn’t like being told I couldn’t do something.
So I took up running.
In the beginning, running was just about building my lungs back up so I could play soccer again. The funny thing is that I ended up loving it more than soccer itself. I didn’t run fast. I stopped a lot to catch my breath. Sometimes I ran so far away from home that I’d struggle with my breathing and have to figure out how to get a ride back. But I didn’t stop running.
Running for me became less about the physical and more about the mental. When you run, if you run long enough, you eventually get into a flow where your mind just seems to gain clarity. I made up stories. Wrote music in my head. Plotted my high school love life. I ran through college, too. Late at night, while most of my friends were out at bars, I’d head out around 11 PM and run into the early morning.
But then I stopped running.
Career. A lot of travel. Becoming a parent. Nothing significant here. Most people stop being active for the same reasons.
Then came what I call the cat years of my life. I’m a cat going through my nine lives.
I’ve survived two bomb explosions. Close encounters that involved guns and sharp objects being pointed at me. A near death drowning in the Pacific. Failed personal relationships. The details matter less than what they left behind.
And what they left behind was someone who didn’t run anymore. Someone who just worked. Did the work and let the traumas take over. Bad dreams. Depression. Taking on riskier and more reckless work, throwing caution to the wind. If I couldn’t process what was happening inside, I’d just keep moving on the outside. Different cities. Different projects. Different dangers.
But the thing about trauma is that it doesn’t actually go away just because you’re busy. It just waits.
I remember the night I found running again. For some reason I felt that the only thing that would keep me alive was to run, and I found myself at the track of the college I attended as a freshman. At, you guessed it, 11:00 PM.
And so I ran around the track.
I quickly ran out of air. My legs hurt. My stomach hurt. My back hurt. My feet hurt. But for some reason, my head did not.
And my love for running returned.
People talk about addiction; to alcohol, to drugs, to anything that makes the noise stop. I found running a better drug. I even tried painkillers for the physical injuries that came later. Running was better than painkillers too. It was the only thing that seemed to metabolize the trauma, to process it through my system in a way that sitting still never could.
I ran. I swam a lot. I started running marathons, then triathlons, then Ironmans. I ran through physical injuries. A broken back. Dislocated shoulders. A broken sternum. As long as I could get on my feet, I ran.
But here’s what I learned about running, about movement, about the thing that happens when your feet hit the ground in rhythm: it’s not really about your body. Your body is just the vehicle. What you’re really doing is giving your brain a way to process everything else. The trauma. The uncertainty. The grief. The chaos of being alive.
When someone tells you that you can’t run, what they’re really telling you, whether they know it or not, is that you can’t process. Can’t think clearly. Can’t be yourself.
Then in 2015, I crossed the finish line at Ironman Chattanooga. Days later, I learned I had a rare autoimmune disease. My body had decided that my lungs and eyes were foreign objects and began attacking them. The doctors were clear: no running. No intensity. Rest.
They had no idea what they were asking.
The disease affects my eyesight. Sometimes I get episodes where I can’t see. The world just turns grey. Everything becomes shapes without definition, forms without meaning. When that happens, I can’t run. When I can’t run, I can’t think. When I can’t think, I’m not sure who I am.
The recovery was long. Not just physically—that part I could understand, could work with. But mentally, being cut off from the one thing that lets me process the world felt like losing a language I’d spoken my entire life. Progress was measured in frustratingly small increments. Walking around the block. Then a slow jog. Rebuilding what felt like someone else’s body.
I worked my way back. Slowly. Painfully. But I worked my way back.
In March 2025, I ran the Los Angeles Marathon. It was the culmination of my long recovery, a test to see if the sea legs would hold. They did.
Then, in November 2024—wait, let me back up. The timeline matters here.
In November 2024, I passed out on a trail run. Lost a lot of blood. Suffered a traumatic brain injury. Spent 5 days with doctors standing over me, poking me, unable to figure out what was wrong. They threw everything at it. Tests, scans, theories. Finally, a Hail Mary diagnosis: complete heart failure.
And there it was again: “You need to stop running.”
You need to stop living, I heard
But I didn’t. I couldn’t. Because here’s what they don’t tell you in those hospital rooms. Sometimes the very thing they say will kill you is the only thing keeping you alive. Not the physical act of running, but what it does for your mind. The rhythm. The clarity. The way the world makes sense at mile 7 in ways it never does sitting still.
So I ran LA in March 2025 to see if I could. To test whether my body and brain could still do the thing they needed to do to survive.
Then I ran the NYC Marathon in November 2025.
Each one a negotiation with my body, but more importantly, proof to my brain that we’re still here. Still moving. Still processing.
Two days ago, I learned I’d been selected as an Abbott Runner for the 2026 TCS London Marathon.
Abbott chose me to represent Team Abbott—a community of runners who’ve faced significant health challenges and want to inspire others through their journeys. They understand something important: for some of us, the health journey and the running journey aren’t separate things. They’re the same thing.
They also understand that the start line for people like me won’t begin at Greenwich Park. It began in hospital rooms. In recovery wards. In the long dark nights wondering if we’d ever feel like ourselves again.
April 26, 2026. The Mall. Buckingham Palace.
I’ll be there. Still moving. Still thinking. Still here.
I’m sharing this now, after years of being silent about my own health journey, because I’ve realized something. Sometimes disease and injury aren’t visible, whether physical or mental. Sometimes the people running marathons are the same people who were told they’d never run again. Sometimes the person next to you on the trail, in the office, at the grocery store, is fighting battles you can’t see.
And sometimes they need to run. Not because they’re running away from something, but because running is the only way they know how to run toward themselves.
I’ll be documenting this journey—the training, the setbacks, the small victories, the invisible struggles—here on Substack and on YouTube. Not because my story is special, but because maybe someone else needs to hear that it’s okay to need movement to survive. That it’s okay to be told you can’t and decide to see for yourself.
I’m running for the kids fighting pediatric cancers who don’t get to choose their battles. For families navigating rare disease diagnoses without roadmaps. For everyone who’s been told “you can’t” and decided the only way to find out was to lace up their shoes.
For everyone who runs because if they don’t, they’re not sure who they are.
See you on the road.
Follow along as I train for London. Updates here and on YouTube @movingthroughgrey (youtube.com/channel/UCdFLfAn4zsGR9JI99bLqgdA). Because sometimes the only way out is through, and the only way through is to move.
Thanks for sharing, Paolo. I appreciate reading your story and getting to know you better through it. I’m cheering you on!