Kintsugi and the art of recovery
The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
So you’re injured. You ran too hard too early, or added mileage too fast. Or you did not recover enough between the races, eagerly jumping into the next training block. Regardless of how you got here — here you are: injured, probably depressed, maybe even in denial.
I’m going to tell you something that you’ve heard hundreds of times before, but only now have the opportunity to properly internalize: injuries are blessings in disguise. But! The thing that most people forget is that simply getting injured does not magically mean you’ll get out of it stronger. You have to be methodical and intentional about your way out of your injury.
Okay, what the hell is kintsugi?
You’re wondering — what does the first word in this post’s subject even mean? Consider a soup bowl. Just like the one on the main image up near that title. One day you drop the bowl and it breaks.
What do you do? The reality is — you probably just throw it away. You have more soup bowls, and even if you don’t, it’s a nice nudge to make you go buy some. Unfortunately, when your body breaks you can’t just go buy a pair of new legs. Would be pretty nice if you could, but I’ve checked really well — no one sells new legs to runners.
So back to our soup bowl analogy — if you had to treat your one and only soup bowl as you treat your body, what would you do? Well, you’d probably become annoyed at this. “Now I need to repair this damn bowl?! FML! I want to eat my soup instead!”. You then probably just go and slap some sticky tape around your bowl like so:
Obviously, this is now a more inferior soup bowl. Moreover, if you drop the bowl again, it only gets worse with time. You could go take your soup bowl to SoupBowlRepairsInc. “But those guys take at least a month to repair a bowl” — you say — “I mean, who has time for that nonsense? I want soup NOW!”¹.
But what if you could have your broken soup bowl turned into this:
Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold and lacquer. It’s the philosophy that something broken can be made into something even more beautiful than it was initially.
This makes a previously sweet bowl into a real work of art, elevating its qualities through the roof. This process shows that the pristine is less beautiful than the broken. This process also makes items much more expensive. Sometimes ten-fold more expensive. If you don’t believe me, go ahead and look up some examples of kintsugi on Etsy or eBay. Seriously go ahead, I’ll wait here.
Convinced yet?
Now let’s now see how we can turn your broken-soup-bowl-ass into proper kintsugi that will come out stronger and better than it ever was.
Step 1: Acceptance
Accept that you’re injured. You might be in denial and still try to run through pain. Don’t do that. The absolutely best thing you can do for yourself after getting injured is recognizing the injury, recognizing that it will take some time to heal, and start planning your recovery.
Step 2: Get to work
Channel your frustration and extra energy into the recovery process. Cross-train like a daredevil that you are. Sign up for those silly cross-country skiing events in the winter. Sneak into an all-lycra outfit, shave your legs, and go ride a bike for a hundred miles. Learn to swim butterfly. Better yet — put all your hatred into aqua-jogging. I know that it looks dorky as hell, especially when you also look angry while doing it. But still, do it — dance like nobody’s watching.
More specifically — work on your weaknesses. You probably know what those are. Are you lifting weights regularly? Do you have a stretching routine? How about a meditation routine? Do you spend time with resistance bands?
Step 3: Be patient
As most things worth pursuing, it won’t happen fast. Depending on how disrespectful you’ve been to your body, you might have to stick to cross-training for months. Get comfortable with that. Try to find solace in these new activities. Try to track your progress — how you become stronger, more flexible, etc. When the time to return to running comes, you’ll know.
Step 4: The comeback
Return to running conservatively. Enjoy the fact that you can run at all again. No speed work! No long runs! Even your easy running distance from before the injury is most probably too much for you right now. And don’t even dream of trying to keep your pre-injury easy pace. Or any pace really. Best thing you can do for yourself during the first month or two — is to leave your GPS watch at home and run by feeling².
Step 5: Enjoy your kintsugi — you’ve earned it
But don’t just discard everything you’ve learned and all the new skills you’ve acquired. The fact that you can run again (although much slower than you used to, and will have to fight your way back to fitness) does not mean that you should stop all the good habits you’ve acquired while recovering. Don’t just drop your newly strength-training/stretching/mindfulness routines — incorporate them into your next training.
Bonus: kintsugi comes in all kinds of forms and shapes³:
There’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.
― Leonard Cohen, Anthem
Footnotes:
¹ For the record, I do recommend going to SoupBowlRepairsInc. They know what they’re doing, and they will get your bowl up and running in the fastest and most professional way.
² I hid mine under the long-sleeve base layer, to avoid the temptation to constantly check my lap pace.
³ Just as injury and recovery aren’t necessarily related to running (or even sports really), kintsugi is not necessarily about pottery (or Japan). Thanks for reading!
