You can ask the mountain
But the mountain doesn’t care
~Antje Duvekot
I’ve forbidden myself to run until November. Coming into my last race I was carrying
four injuries: strains to the proximal left hamstring tendon, distal left
posterior tibialis tendon, and left gastrocnemius, and a strange undiagnosed pain
in the fifth metatarsal on my right foot.
All of these became worse during my last LSD run and even more so during
the race. The gastroc injury is
probably nothing; if that were the only issue I would just keep running. The tibialis tendon pain is also minor,
although, to quote Drake, “like a sprained ankle, boy, I ain’t nothing to play
with.” It requires rest, but I’m
fairly confident that it will solve itself with some strengthening of the glute
med on that side. The other two,
contrarily, could be real problems.
The reason I worry about the metatarsal pain is that I don’t
know where it came from (no memorable trauma to that foot), and it doesn’t seem
to get better with time. These are
classic signs of a stress fracture.
WebMD will tell you that rest will heal a stress fracture, which sounds
great, but when was the last time you heard about Yao Ming? I’m probably just being paranoid over a
bone bruise or a poorly fitting shoe, or perhaps I just forgot kicking whatever
it was that I kicked, but the pain occupies a corner of my mind nonetheless.
The most serious injury, though, and the real reason for the
4 mph speed limit, is the left hamstring.
I first injured it in June, at the very beginning of my summer distance
training. I was running a
Sierra/History trail loop in the Watchung Reservation, which always seems to
take me an hour, and I saw myself behind pace with a mile to go. The last mile is slightly downhill on
reasonably smooth surface, so I opened it up as far as I could and basically
sprinted until I felt the stiffness behind my hip.[1] I slowed down, finished the run, and
hoped it would be okay.
My leg didn’t feel too bad when I woke up the next morning,
but after driving to work I could barely walk. Ouch. I cut
back on training for a few days, decided it felt better enough, and tried to press
through. The muscle and tendon
held up well enough through the intervening months for me to train and
eventually to race, but they never felt quite right. On top of this, there are two very clear training
indications that something is wrong.
First, my top pace in mile repeats last spring was just over 5 minutes,
and now I’m struggling to get below 5:30 for even one mile. Second, my left leg can barely lift 40
pounds on a single leg hamstring curl, while the bar actually lifts up off my
foot from the upward acceleration when pulling that weight with my right. What does all this mean? Left hamstring strain leading to muscle
weakness leading to proximal hamstring tendonitis leading to “Oh crap now
what?” I’d even bet that the other
left leg injuries resulted from a breakdown in my stride as the hamstring tired
on long runs. Now I’m just hoping
that three weeks off will let me heal enough for the leg to withstand mild
running and strengthening.
Rest may heal my body, but what about my mind? Sitting around in the evenings is driving
me stir crazy. My sleep is
suffering, and I can almost feel the daily uptick in my blood cortisol and
thyroxine levels. My wife is sure
to reference me as an irritating and obsessive jerk any moment. Ugg.
These are the feelings that sent me fleeing to the South
Mountain Reservation today. We
were blessed with beautiful fall weather in North Jersey, low 60’s with a few
clouds, dry air, and brilliant sunlight.
I’ve been meaning to explore the reservation as a close-to-home training
backup to the Watchung, so after entertaining my (now three-year-old!) son with
a hayride and pumpkin patch in the morning I set off for Washington Rock. Stopped short by the “Authorized
Vehicles Only” sign, I left the truck at the dog park and walked among the
oaks, maples, and beech trees.
I’ve read many passages by runners claiming that running is
“meditative”, and a scathing reply from a runner/monk who claims that the
others have no idea what meditation is.
I’m no expert in meditation, but I tend to agree with the monk. Meditation is about stillness and
reflection. Trail running is about
motion and engagement. But what
about trail walking? The
challenges of a technical surface disappear below my 4 mph speed limit,
allowing me to disengage from the immediate and apprehend the slow rhythms of
the trees, the breezes, the deer, and the chipmunks (I admit it, the little
stripy guys are one of my favorite animals). As I walked, I watched brown and yellow leaves drop
from trees and float slowly to the ground, their photosynthetic work complete. I scared up a white tail doe, and
warned an eight-point buck that I could catch him if I got hungry (false
bravado, given the injuries). He
stared back, uncomprehending and unconcerned, never having had to worry that a
running human might actually pose a threat. He chewed the cud of whatever plants he’d been eating,
storing fat by the moment. I told the chipmunk that I knew he was tiny, no
matter how much noise he could make in the fallen leaves, and he rustled across
the forest floor anyway. I spread my
fingers on lifted hands to sense the soft movement of the air, smelled the dust
of the fallen leaves crunched beneath my feat, felt the weak warmth of the
autumn sun on my arm as it played over the newly scarred skin, a memento of a
misstep during my last run. I
tried to empty myself and allow the void to be filled with the timeless flow of
life over the earth. I tried to
fill myself with the unhurried and unworried preparation that the animals and
plants were making before the coming winter, building nests, storing energy,
pulling back to roots, dying with secured eggs prepared to hatch when the
seasons turned.
I am human though, unable to escape worry and
distraction. As a species, our
ability to project possible futures is a great and defining tool, but a bother
also. I know no peace, because I
know my present is built on an unsustainable construction of culture and
infrastructure for which I bear no responsibility. I know my future will unfold amidst an unpredictable torrent
whose currents I cannot affect and whose waves can pull me under in a moment or
lift me up and shatter me against the rocks. I know that the coming winter is the least of my problems.
It takes great strength to find serenity. What makes it so hard is that this
strength is the strength of inaction, of weakness even, of letting go. It’s not a strength of doing, of making
a better future, because those efforts can easily fall in vain. Nor is it a strength of faith, which
would promise that tomorrow will be okay, when in truth it might not be. Serenity is the strength of accepting
the torrent, accepting the waves and the rocks. Serenity is the courage of living your life and striving for
goals in full knowledge of their present and future irrelevance.
[1] For anyone
who is new to distance training, this was sheer stupidity. I was begging for the injury that I
got. There’s no reason to sprint
out the last mile of a training run when I couldn’t keep pace for the first
seven. Far smarter would have been
to coast in, feel bad about the slow time, get a good night’s sleep, and rock
it the next day.
No comments:
Post a Comment