Joseph Agonistes
I’ve always been kinda proud of the various little injuries I’ve sustained from athletics. Jammed thumbs, broken toes, swollen joints, pulled muscles — these are the battle scars of the first world, of safe societies where we no longer fight literal battles. Maybe this is because nothing truly terrible has ever befallen me. I’ve never broken anything bigger than a toe. The gouges that have left scars on my knees and hands have been, in the long run, not much more than owies.
For a few minutes yesterday, I was worried that my run of good luck had come to an end. I was jogging down a gentle slope on E Burnside toward 39th when, for no reason I can figure out, I planted my left foot on its side and brought down the entirety of my weight on it. The foot rolled inward. Hard. The popping noise it made was so loud that it penetrated my headphones. I collapsed onto the sidewalk, and crawled into the dirt, screaming so loud that I roused some guys from across the street, who wandered out to see what was going on. I told them I was fine. I wasn’t sure it was true for sure, but I just didn’t want them to look at me while I was in pain. I had a sense that this wasn’t going to be one of those dings that I felt proud of later. I was just plain hurt.
I think I was yelling so loudly in part because I knew right away that this marathon I’ve been training for was in jeopardy. I didn’t know yet if the ankle was broken, but it was at least badly sprained. I’m 9 weeks out. If I don’t get to run this marathon, it’ll be the third in a row that I’ve missed because I hurt myself or got sick with about 2 months of training left. I kind of couldn’t believe it. There wasn’t a pothole or a rock or anything — just an awkward step, on what was supposed to be an easy, 4-mile jog, and everything was in danger of falling apart.
My emotional responses remained all out of whack for a while. I limped to a nearby park and called an Uber to take me home, and as I was sitting there on the curb, I started to cry. Not because I was in pain — the ankle was swollen but basically painless, at least at first — but because running this marathon had been something I’d pinned a lot of hopes on, without even quite realizing it. It was giving me purpose, the training was helping with my weight, and I was even enjoying it, painful though it sometimes was. But more than that, if I could run this marathon, it would mean I had returned to normal, after several years of not-normal, of bad, of depression and grief and feeling lost. And that might be gone.
A day later I have a better perspective. The sprain is bad — I’ve been on crutches — but the fact is, if I can’t run this marathon, I’ll run one in February or March instead. It’s going to be okay.
Now it’s mostly about the embarrassment and hassle of getting around injured. People look at you differently when you’re on crutches. Some people seem to feel pity, which is bad enough — but worse are the ones whose instinct is to shy away, as though whatever you did to yourself might be catching. Now, I seem to have come down with a cold, so I do have something that is catching. But the injured leg is distinctly non-communicable. Don’t worry, I’m not going to hurt you.
The apartment has got messy, because cleaning sucks when you can’t really walk. It makes simple things more complicated — forgetting your wallet, say, or trying to decide whether to put on fresh pants after a shower. I’ve discovered that I own a lot of hot sauce — at least six varieties, all of which I appear to have put on stuff over the last couple of days, but couldn’t bring myself to haul back to the fridge. (Problem: how do you carry stuff on crutches? Solution: in your teeth, a lot of the time.) I ran out of plates this afternoon. How many plates can one person use in 36 hours? Do I not own enough plates? It’s always felt like I owned too many plates, at least to me. Now it would be nice to have an infinite supply.
Anyway. I’m going to finish watching this Pirates - Cubs game, and spend the next two days icing my ankle. Should be boring, but whatever.