Everything Always Hurts
Injuries plague runners. They certainly plague me.
I wish I could blame them on my age, but I was injured when I started running regularly twenty years ago — a balky knee that I sleeved up for three years — and I’ve had to manage my way through dozens and dozens of injuries since.
Overuse stress fracture. IT-band strains. Rolled ankles. Runner’s knee. Pulled hamstrings. Plantar fasciitis. Too many calf strains to count — that seems to be my go-to injury. Even neck strains caused by holding my head up when riding my road bike (hey, cross-training is part of my running life so I’m including it).
And like most of us, despite the evidence above, I think of injuries as exceptions and inconveniences that, if ignored, will just go away on their own. Kinda like a mid-run twinge that can be handled with a few minutes of a slightly-slower pace. My collection of braces, supports, neoprene joint sleeves, and kinesiology tape is large and growing.
For which I blame my cousin Tim.
We all have favorite cousins growing up, and I had two: Tim on my father’s side and Mike on my mother’s. Both were slightly older than me but seemed infinitely cooler. I’d only see them once a year or so, since we lived far away from northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin, where nearly all my relatives still reside.
I am the oldest in my immediate family. And as a consequence of both an emotionally-reserved nature and a hands-off nurturing, I craved validation growing up. A lot of validation. And I had no older siblings to provide it. Mike was far too consumed with the swirling of her own adolescence to deal with a cousin both needy and nerdy who occasionally dropped into her life. (And yes, Mike’s given name was Laura, but her brother Jeff decided he needed a younger brother and nicknamed her Mike when she was born. It stuck, at least while we were young.)
Enter Tim.
The youngest of my four cousins on my father’s side, Tim is about two years older than me. And so much cooler. And he seemed to like having me around. I mean, his siblings certainly weren’t doing the hero-worship thing for him, so he probably appreciated the adulation that accompanied my periodic visits. I usually spent a night at Uncle Edward and Aunt Billie’s house when we visited Illinois, and I suspect Tim was assigned cousin-care by his parents. If so, he sold it well.
The thing about Tim is that he always gave me attention without judgment, in keeping with his family’s ethos. Edward and Billie raised a lively family, very self-possessed, but gentle too. I very much enjoyed all my time spent with them, and I regret that we don’t see each other outside of Facebook any more. Commitments to our own families and busy adult lives compound the complications presented by distant geography. But as a kid I reveled in Tim’s presence. I may not have quite idolized him, but it was a close thing. I couldn’t pull off the easy grace and confidence he projected, so I looked for other ways I could imitate him.
Unfortunately, Tim was a little pigeon-toed. And I was not.
But I tried to be.
And I had mixed results. While my right foot stubbornly refused my efforts and retains its normal pronation to this day, I did train my left foot to point inward enough to supinate on that side. And that created a mismatched stride. So my left foot is perennially rolling over while my right works exactly as designed, and that leads to strains up and down my left leg. And sometimes I get compensating strains on my right side for good measure.
I’ve thought about invoicing Tim for all races for which I registered but didn’t run because of injuries, and for all of the physical therapy and chiropractic sessions (with those diabolical Graston implements that the bastards at Precision Sports Medicine wield), and for all of the spiky balls and trigger-point rollers and yoga straps I bought and used (and sometimes didn’t use), because the total would easily run into the thousands of dollars.
But then Tim is a favorite cousin, an influential part of my life in so many ways, and those memories of playing with toy soldiers or watching western movies on television are important ones for me. And in that light the price of my injuries doesn’t seem quite as onerous.
But I do sometimes wonder why Tim couldn’t have been slightly out-toed instead . . . .
