The Endless Injury

The Endless Injury

2 angry grams of flesh…

I ran 2.5 miles this weekend.  2.5 measly miles.  Nothing but a warm up distance.  I felt out of shape and discombobulated.  I was sore the next day.  My heel has ached ever since.  The Plantar fasciitis.  That 2 grams of angry tissue in my heel has dictated to the 200 pounds of ex-athlete that is me that I still can’t run.

I look at the 50 or more medals from marathons and endurance events that hang on my office wall.  They are stacked haphazardly like things acquired through a small amount of effort.  Inconsequential things thrown into a heap like cheap chattel.  Such is my hubris.  Such is my disregard for the gift.

In my laundry room hang sheaves of bib numbers from races run.  Casually hung and strung. Small numbers, big numbers, 5k’s marathons, they all mock me too.  They look down on a pile of idle running shoes.  Shoes with 100-200 300 500 or 1,000 miles on them.  Shoes that have seen the finish lines of many races and the starting lines of many a long training run.

Idle shoes.

A drawer or two full of race tee shirts.  A bag or two of race tee shirts.  Still being worn, but somehow I feel like a poser, a fake and a charlatan.

2.5 measly miles.  2 angry grams of tissue.

The calendar slips by each day and each day gets harder.  The fitness drips away.  Drip.  Drip.  Drip.  The cross training is an exercise in futility. It is nothing more then re-arranging the chairs on the on the deck of the Titanic as inch by inch it slowly disappears into the North Atlantic.

2 grams and it is unceasingly angry.

I wish for other injuries.  I wish for that broken ankle where I had to teach myself how to walk again.  I wish for that broken knee when I knew it would someday heal.  And it did.  And I ran, slowly at first.  Fat and uncoordinated. Back to the trails.  Back to the roads.  Back to the starting lines and finish lines.

To be worthy once again of those medals, of those tee shirts, of those unicorns of the friendship of runners.

God help me! Anger is 2 grams of flesh.

Brought low the mighty by 2 grams of angry flesh.  The nail in the shoe that lost the horse that lost the rider that lost the battle that lost the war that lost the kingdom of my running.  I am at the end.  I am starting over.  I just want to be able to start!  I just want to reach in there and carve those 2 grams out!  Could a hole be worse than this small protesting bundle of knotted meat?

Is this it?   Is this that point where I have given up that it all starts to turn around and I make that determined climb back to fitness?  Is this the bottom?  Can I now begin the 12 steps and get back to the thousands of steps I love?

Today I have no answers.  I have no plan.  I have no remedies.  I have lost my gift.

I have lost it to 2 grams of angry flesh.

So, my friends mark this on your calendar.  This was the day that Chris gave up hope.  This was the day that Chris decided to stop fighting and roll around in the stinking filth of his own self-pity.

That way, weeks or months or years from today you can remind me how much of a sniveling fool I was.  You can laugh in my face.  Because as much as I’d like to join you in the woods, on the trail today with my dog in a happy ramble, injuries are the stock and trade of a runner’s life.

There aint no rest for the wicked and it’s time for me to get back to work.  My job is healing.  My job is staying in control.  My job is NOT giving up.

And that’s the rub with chronic injuries; how do you stay in control.  How do you steer your 200 pound ship when it is stranded on the rocks of 2 grams of angry flesh?  The wise captain steers in another direction.

Life’s a journey and mine has been filled with gifts.  It’s time for me to stop sniveling and move forward.  Forward is the only direction.  The other direction puts you in the ground.

I’ll see you out there, one way or the other.

C-,