Running:
-Makes me feel good
-Makes my body feel good
-Makes my brain feel good
(What is "me" if not the brain and body? Why this instinct to dichotomize?)
-Lets me have big and small adventures
-Makes me feel like I'm progressing towards something
As I began navigating my new lifestyle for the next two months and the attendant change in mindset -- living in my friend's house, no job, no money, no routine, no constancy -- I was running a good bit. Mostly every day. The running felt like a constant in a lot of flux. And it made me feel good. It made my body feel good. It made my brain feel good. Etc from above.
I've had to ship back to Boston every Monday for the past month for graduate school classes -- more flux. Two weeks ago, I went down on Saturday to see my good friend J and help him move into a new studio apartment in Somerville. We loaded his shit into a U-Haul and another truck and listened to his dad give us instructions on how to move furniture, and at the end his mom tried to give me cash and I said no and she insisted ("You've said no three times. Now you can take it.") Then Monday class and saw another friend, and Tuesday again, and then it was Wednesday and I'd eaten out for 10 consecutive meals (I used the cash from J's mom) and slept in beds that weren't my own and I hadn't exercised, and all in all I felt like a bouncy ball in those videos where they crush bouncy balls with a hydraulic press and first they sort of squish down until they reach the point where they can't squish anymore and there's a fraction of a pause before the seams burst. Too much flux.
So I drove as fast as I could back to the woods in Vermont, excited for a run. I made it back around 5. I said to C, "I gotta get a run in."
"Alright," he said. (He always says alright.) "People are coming for pizza at 5:30."
Not enough time, I thought. I skipped the run to make pizza instead. And I woke up the next day, Thursday, with the attendant brain fog and energy that pizza and beer provide, and I thought, goshdarnit, today's the day! Today I'm fricken' running!
One of my favorite notions on running is that we are animals, and there is a natural animalistic joy to running. Snakes slither with no destination. The family dog whips around the yard, not chasing anything. They're happy. Movement pleases the animal body.
So I loaded up a map on Footpath, a nice 7-miler going through the Hartford Town Forest. I cued up The Who and stepped outside, and I let out a little yip and shook my animal self and started running. I felt good, felt my legs churning under and I cruised up some of the uphills to the start of the forest. I felt like I could go forever. I passed a few people in the little parking area at the trailhead. I dipped into the forest and kept motoring, singing out loud to myself, and I followed the Jeep road up to a sort of natural peak, stepping over rocks and roots and puddles, looking at all the green stuff, taking a few selfies, just vibing. All the flux, the accumulated crud of time spent as a visitor, flowed right on out.
The Jeep road (two parallel ruts, higher ground on the sides and in between) made up the trail, and I quick-stepped my way through the gentle downhill. About three miles in, I stepped to the outside of the trail to dodge some mud, and I felt my shoe give a little bit. "Woo-oo," I said. "Close one." I righted and kept going.
And then came another one. Not a close one, but a close one gone too far -- I don't think there's an expression for it. Dodging deep water in the ruts, I tried to step into the middle of the trail -- what looked like solid ground. Pure mud. I went up to my ankle, my left ankle, and started slipping, and tried not to fall in the puddle, and as I squirmed and shifted I felt my ankle pop, and I fell into the mud, and I said, "Ah."
I got up, totally covered in mud. My phone, which I was holding in my hand, was covered in mud. The forest ended another quarter mile ahead, and I limped my way down, avoiding putting weight on the ankle. It felt real bad. Non-runnable. I thought I'd get to the main road at the other trailhead, and I'd flag down a car, and ask for a ride back to C's house. I limped out of the woods and saw the road crossing and thought, finally, and then I stepped out fully and saw, well, nothing. One house way off in the distance. It was a long, dirt driveway more than a road, and I was stuck in the middle of nowhere.
I hobbled down a little ways, thinking maybe a car would come, and none did, so finally I bit the bullet and admitted defeat and ridicule and lack of self-sufficiency and all of it and I called C.
"I've had an accident," I said. "Can you pick me up?"
"Alright," he said.
So I sat down in a ditch at the side of the road, waiting for a rescue.
Icarus and the sun, pride before the fall, the highest of highs, the lowest of lows, etc. A litany of tropes, thick as mud.
"It's only hubris if I fall," Cesar supposedly said.
Calamity.
I've been not running for about a week now, and I think I have another week or so to go, and I feel myself shriveling. I've been exercising (bought a Facebook marketplace pull-up bar on my way out of Boston, and with that and the cinderblock I'm close to building a commercial gym in C's basement). But it's not the same. My brain doesn't feel the same. On top of it, there have been a few frustrations this week, and I feel like they're sticking more than they should.
It all raises the question: how should we handle calamity? What is the appropriate response in the face of challenge, strife, injury?
One response is to crawl to comfort. You ice your ankle. You keep it up and you stay in bed. Hide your running shoes. Eat some ice cream and watch Netflix with the shades drawn. You can't see outside. There is no outside. You need warmth, seventeen hours of sleep and seven hours of standby, the perpetual blue-light kiss goodnight.
Another, I suppose, is to imagine that calamity hasn't stricken. You are, perhaps, a very tough individual, a big strong proto-hominid devoid of any emotion. You say, "Arghh," when you fall, and you flex and pump blood back into your ankle, and you hobble on it for a few aching steps, feeling the tendons shift and grind, and then you say, "Arghh," again, as close to an emotional outburst as you are capable, and you keep on running.
Two worldviews. Another dichotomy.
But science has a worldview, too.
In my incessant Googling about sprained ankles (from this one and the last one, last October), I found that, medically, there is a consensus on the advice for injury -- here I'm referencing only physical, ankle-specific injury, but I think it tracks nicely to all sorts of hurt, and I wrote this next bit considering other kinds of damage, too.
The medical advice is to rest and ice and compress and elevate (or RICE, if you need an acronym to remember it, you baby). For 48 hours. 2 days. Draw the curtains. Listen to Sara Bareilles and think of the race you can no longer run next weekend, all of the what-ifs and could-have-beens, and weep gently. Your ice cream catches your tears. Doctor recommended.
But after the 48 hours, you gotta get some weight back on that sucker!! The sooner you do, the quicker the healing. I'm not making it up:
"Meta-analyses have shown that functional treatment, such as early active use of the injured soft tissue, may be more effective for improving recovery from an ankle sprain"
(Am Fam Physician. 2011;83(11):1340-1343).
Not to say that you should push through the grinding of bones and ligaments ("Keep motion within your pain-free zone to avoid making the injury worse," says Mayo Clinic). But, when injured, total immobilization and total avoidance of any and all things that may cause discomfort or painful memories won't actually make you heal faster. You gotta get back out there, champ.
It makes me think of two other scenarios.
The first is the last time I rolled my ankle, and they didn't want to X-ray it at urgent care, and my then-nurse-girlfriend (then-girlfriend, still a nurse) told me it was for sure fractured but I didn't want to go back to urgent care because my car was dead, and I didn't want to ask for help getting to urgent care because I don't like asking for help (but I called C this time -- I've grown!), and so I just kind of iced it and propped it up against the wall while I watched TV for four months, and me and my then-girlfriend broke up, and finally I got a PCP because I went off my parents' health insurance plan, and when I went for my consult I told the doctor what was going on, and she said sorry about the breakup, and she scheduled an X-ray and gave me a referral for PT, and the X-ray was negative, and I went to PT and I told the guy I hadn't run in four months, and he said, "Dude, you gotta just go run on this thing." Huh.
I'm inventing the other scenario:
A young individual steps up to bat for his first game of Little League. Maybe it's his first time facing a live overhand pitcher, and not just his uncle who is required to assistant coach in a youth development capacity as part of the conditions of his early release. Anyway, up at the mound is one of those twelve-year-olds who seem to defy the laws of twelve-year-olds, a hulking man of a child, pure muscle, stubble lining his jaw and bags under his eyes from his overnight shift welding WMDs. Our protagonist, by contrast, is more slight in build. He enjoys fingerpainting.
So the little hero steps up to the plate and jerks the bat up onto his shoulder, and the franken-man winds up his six-foot frame. His elbow twinges on the motion, an old injury from years of late-night welding, and his fastball careens right into the little guy's ribs. It knocks the breath out of him and it knocks the prescription lenses off of him.
"Ah," he says, doubled over.
"Arghh," says the pitcher. He's still learning the word "sorry."
In the face of calamity, our prepubescent king could hide from the baseball diamond forever. He could throw his glove in the dumpster, burn all the shoes that don't have a fleece lining on the inside, and relegate himself to a life of thin comfort.
Alternatively, he could storm the mound. The ump says, "You okay, buddy?" and he responds by tossing the bat nonchalantly. He puffs his chest and takes two steps to first, glaring at the pitcher the whole time, and when the pitcher finally looks up at him and makes eye contact, as remorseful as possible, wishing that old injury hadn't flared up at such an inopportune time and thinking that there is no pain greater than the pain of harming others, our young boy charges. "That's it!" he yells. "You're done for!" "Arghh!"
Neither, I think, go too well.
The final option is that he catches his breath. Takes a minute. 48 seconds. When he's ready, walks down to first. He thinks to himself, that hurt. And then he keeps on keepin' on.
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