Every time I lace up at 6am on the Sliema promenade, the sea still dark, the city not yet awake, I think: I almost never got to do this again.
Not in a grateful, inspirational way. Just factually. There was a version of this story that ended differently — in a hospital room, in a wheelchair, in a life where running was past tense. I got the other version. And that changes what running means.
This is the first FLOR RUNS post. I'm starting here, with the scars I've spent years covering up, because anything else would be dishonest.
The Car Accident
Four years ago, I was in a serious car accident.
Femur broken in four pieces. Tibia in six. Splenectomy — they took my spleen out. Broken ribs, backbone, cheekbone, nose. Nerve damage that I still notice on cold mornings when one leg doesn't quite behave the way I tell it to.
I'm not going to write the dramatic version of what the days after that looked like. Partly because I don't love reliving it, and partly because the dramatic version is less interesting than the boring version: it was a very long time of very small progress, hospital corridors, physio sessions, crutches, and then a walking stick, and then nothing — and then slowly, eventually, the question of whether I could run again.
The scars that came from all of this are still there. I have several. I spent years covering them in public because they always prompted questions I didn't have the energy to answer. Now, four years on, I'm done editing them out of the story.
What Running Feels Like Now
Here's what nobody tells you about coming back to running after something serious: the body part that needs the most work isn't physical.
The legs rebuilt. Slowly, with a lot of help, they rebuilt. The nerve damage means certain things are permanently different — I'll never have full sensation in one area, and my gait on tired days still leans slightly — but the mechanics work. I run. I ran a half marathon last year. I train four days a week most weeks, more when life allows, less when it doesn't.
But the mental part — the relationship with running itself — changed completely.
Before the accident, I ran because I was training for something, or because I felt guilty about not running, or because I wanted the numbers to look a certain way on Strava. I ran against a backdrop of other people's times and my own expectations of what my times should be.
After? I run at 6am in Malta when the light comes up orange over the sea and I think: this is mine. Not because I earned it through training — but because I almost didn't get it at all.
[INTERNAL LINK NEEDED: link to Malta running routes — best dawn routes in Sliema and Dingli]
Running Doesn't Feel Like Work When You Know the Alternative
This is the part I'm still figuring out how to talk about without sounding like a motivational poster.
I don't want to make this into a lesson. I'm not here to tell you to "appreciate every run" because you might get hurt — that's not particularly useful advice and it's not why I'm writing this.
What I actually want to say is more specific: surviving something serious rewires what "hard" means.
A tough training run — tired legs, late start, pace slower than I wanted — used to frustrate me. Now it registers differently. The frustration is still there. But underneath it is something that feels like: dai, you're here. You're running badly on a Tuesday morning in Malta and your left leg is throwing a tantrum and the sea is right there and you're doing it.
That's not inspiration. That's just arithmetic. I have context I didn't used to have.
Some runners find this kind of thing liberating. Some find it weird — they preferred when they could just be annoyed about a bad run without the perspective interrupting. Allura, both are valid. I oscillate between the two on any given week.
Why Start Here
I could have launched FLOR RUNS with a training plan. A gear review. A route guide to Malta's best running spots. Those are coming — they're useful, they're what I searched for myself when I was coming back.
But I didn't want to start with utility. I wanted to start with the real thing.
The real thing is: I'm a woman in my 40s who was in a serious car accident and was put back together and now runs four times a week on one of the most beautiful islands in the Mediterranean. I have nerve damage and several scars and opinions about the best time to run the Sliema promenade (6:15am in summer, before it gets crowded). I am not a coach or a physio. I'm just someone who nearly lost this and didn't.
FLOR RUNS is going to be training logs, route guides, honest race reports, gear I actually use, and the bad weeks alongside the good ones. Real numbers, real effort, real Malta.
[INTERNAL LINK NEEDED: link to first training log or gear page]
If you've come back from something — a serious injury, an accident, time off, anything — I'd genuinely like to hear how it changed your relationship with running. Drop it in the comments. Not the polished version. The real one.
Follow along at followtheflor.com. New posts go up most weeks — the training log, route guides, and whatever's currently going well or not going well in my running life.