Injury to a Kinetic Chain
My slow-to-heal hamstring injury — well, hamstring and other back-of-the-leg-tissues injury — continues to frustrate me.
We’ve established that I’m not the most patient runner coming back from injuries. Mark Remy might as well have used my avatar in place of the female patient in this iconic panel. But I’m finding again that my running injuries have a domino effect on the rest of my life. Or maybe it’s a butterfly effect. But whatever the case, it’s frustrating me in ways that extend beyond my fitness.
Don’t get me wrong — I’m teeth-grindingly aggravated to see my fitness wither away. My recent travel played havoc with any gym workouts that I might have done to offset the runs I couldn’t manage. It embarrasses me that climbing stairs at the airport last weekend winded me. And I’m mortified to see my upper body looking so toneless. So yes, the loss of fitness bothers me. A lot.
But it’s not just the fitness.
I tried to join my friends Tony, Roger, and Dennis on a short trail run over the weekend. But my injury tugged at the back inside of my knee with every stride, and discretion dictated that I bail on the run after a mile and a half. The walk of shame back to the trailhead was bad enough, but I’ve done it enough that it doesn’t hurt (much) to swallow it. What really bothered me was missing the hour I would have otherwise spent with my friends, catching up with our lives and family news and increasingly frequent body failures and medical procedures, bemoaning the Israeli-Palestinian disaster and offering solutions that ignore millennia of history, discussing the latest technology that befuddles us, and mostly trying to make each other laugh. In a word, camaraderie.
I’ve belabored how social running is for me. It’s one of my pillars of human connection, along with an extroverted partner who arranges gatherings large and small and a family that enjoys its own company. Without the ability to run, though, I have to work too hard to overcome my hesitancy to engage with others, even people I know well.
An illustration:
My mother had kidney surgery on Monday. She had a cancerous tumor removed. The surgery went well, and she was understandably and appropriately cranky as she recovered overnight in the hospital. They sent her home the next evening as scheduled, and then I flew out the following day.
I didn’t check in with her yesterday, which understandably and appropriately appalled my partner Kim. I should have at least texted to see how my mother felt, but I’m not the best son. My family is a little odd in just how fervently we dislike imposing on others, which naturally extends to ourselves too. I figured that if there was any news to report, my parents would report it. Otherwise, I assume all is well. Kim doesn’t really understand, and in the cold light of day, our family approach does seem, well, cold. But it’s our way.
So you might be starting to fathom just how much I rely on structured opportunities like scheduled runs to meet my social needs.
But my dependence on running goes beyond how much I rely on it to connect me to others. It also connects me to the physical world around me, grounding me in my environment, which in turn settles my mind.
I spend a lot of time in my head. A lot of time. The fiction I write is dominated by internal and external conversations with very little energy paid to settings. It’s my way.
But running outside requires engagement with the world. The feel of the ground. The smell of the air. The people I encounter. The animals I see, domestic and not. The scenery, both near and far. The act of running affirms the body for sure, but it also lifts the spirit. It places me in the greater world. It says that I’m here, in this place, now. I generally struggle to stay present; running helps me with that.
Without running I drift. More than usual. Which is why I’m impatient to get back to it.
