On Running Injuries, or, All That You Love Will Be Carried Away
I’ve been a teacher for almost 25 years, and one truism I’ve learned is that almost everyone at a school—- students, teachers, admin, parents—- is always counting down the days until something happens. How long until Fall Break, how long until Christmas Break, Spring Break, Summer Break, until I graduate, until that one kid graduates, until I’m done with this class, until I’m able to retire, etc. I’m not sure if that’s true of other careers since this is the only one I’ve ever had, but since schools are so dominated by bell schedules, calendars, and cyclical routines, it is especially prevalent there. But, although I am always aware how many minutes are left with my most difficult class or how many days until I get to go on my Spring Break out of the Midwest, I try to catch myself when I get to far into that mode of thinking and recenter myself in the present. When I was starting out, an older, wiser teacher told me, “When you get to be a certain age, you start to realize that if you’re always counting down the days to something else, you’re really just counting down the days until you can’t enjoy them any more.” That struck a chord with me, and I’ve held on to that idea ever since.
I found myself thinking about that lesson when I was recently diagnosed with a stress fracture and had to stop running for about a month. I’ve always been physically pretty durable—- this is the first broken bone I’ve ever had, I rarely too sick to go to work, I function well on next to no sleep, I’m the only person in my family who never got COVID, in my drinking days I was pretty effective at life even when I had a screaming hangover, etc. Don’t get me wrong, psychologically I’m a house of cards waiting for a stiff breeze to knock me down, but physical durability and resilience has always been a kind of super power of mine. And as a life-long long distance runner, I had gotten complacent relying on that physical durability. I’m lazy about stretching, I’ve been known to jump my mileage up in stupid increments trying to get ready for a race, I run races that I haven’t trained for, I run in shoes that need to be replaced, and that physical constitution has always been there to bail me out. Until this time. This time, I ended up in a walking boot and crutches a few weeks before I was supposed to be setting a PR running the Indianapolis Monumental Marathon. A few days ago, with my doctor’s approval, I took the boot off and started trying to build myself back up into a running shape. My foot started swelling and I felt more pain than I’d been in for weeks, so its looking like back to the boot and a probable visit to an MRI. My super power did not bail me out this time.
So, I’ve had time to think over these last few weeks. I’m going to come back from this injury, I know that. But this has forced me to realize that, at some point, one of these days, I will have to stop running. Hopefully that won’t happen for another few decades, but no human being has been able to beat those odds yet and I doubt I’m the exception. At some point in my life, I will go for my last run. I may or may not know it at the time, but I will put my running shoes on for the last time some day, and then I’ll never run again.
I started reflecting on the fact that this is true of everything else in my life, too. Since I’ve got all this time on my hands, I made a list of things that I like that will someday be taken away from me. At some point, my boys will be too big for me to pick up and carry around, too old for me to read stories to, and on and on. There will be a last book I ever read, a last conversation I ever have with my dad, with my wife, with each of my friends. I’ll smoke a last cigar, watch a last horror movie, and drink a last Diet Dr. Pepper. As Stephen King once titled a short story, “All that you love will be carried away.”
Of course, the same is true for all the things in my life I don’t enjoy. I will change my last diaper at some point, and clean up the last little boy pee accident off the floor. I’ll watch my last car insurance commercial, request a code for my last two-factor authorization, make my last mortgage payment, and manage my temper throughout my last frustrating customer service phone call. All those things will be taken away as well.
The lesson for me is two fold. First, never take the things I love for granted. Second, stop getting angry about the things I don’t enjoy. Because the one thing that is true about both is that they are finite. All things, George Harrison would remind us, must pass. That holds true for stress fractures the same as it holds true for childhood innocence. As a runner, I’ve been struggling through long runs that felt for all the world like they would literally never end, like I would be out in the rain by myself hobbling along on a tweaked calf muscle for the rest of my life. But all of those runs did end, which is why I’m writing this on the couch under a cozy blanket instead of somewhere around mile 11 of a 30K I did ten years ago that seemed like it was going to kill me. And just the same, every blissful vacation moment on a sun drenched beach I’ve ever experienced is now consigned to a rapidly receding past, never to return.
At some point, I will no longer be dealing with this injury and I will be running again. And I plan to make the most of it, which is why I’m organizing this trip (and asking for your help in doing it, you wonderful reader you). And right now, even though my foot hurts, it’s overcast and 35 degrees outside, and both my kids are sick and whiney, I’m not going to look past today. Because if all you do is count down the days to Summer Vacation, you’re going to wake up one morning to find yourself dead.
