I could tell that no one was taking me seriously.
“I’m worried about it,” I anxiously confessed to Dave, my teammate, on the start line.
“You’ll be fine,” he smiled bemusedly, before punching me on the arm and telling me to ‘toughen up.’ His response irked me, almost as much as the sharp pain I felt in my shin. I’d show him what tough looked like. I’d show them all how tough I could be.
As it turned out, I was far tougher than most people would have guessed and far less cautious than I should have been. Exactly eighteen minutes and thirty seconds later I crossed the finish line and collapsed, having just unknowingly raced 5 km on a stress fracture. I was unable to walk again for three weeks.
“I totally assumed you were just being a wimp,” Dave admited to me as I stood by the track some three weeks later in a knee-high, two-hundred-dollar Aircast, “I guess I was wrong.”
That was the exact moment when I realized that I had a problem. I had just fractured a major bone trying to prove to everyone around me — teammates, coaches, friends, family, random on-lookers — that I was tough, despite their implicit…
