Today Facebook, thoughtful as ever, brought up my memories, which as most of you know is a regurgitation of your old posts, friends made, etc. on that day in years past. Yeah, I'm being a bit of a smart aleck about it but it is actually pretty interesting many times and this is one of those times.
Anyway, according to the sluggish media giant allI posted five years ago this day that while on a walk I had jogged up a few hills. If you don't know me well or were not aware, on the day before thanksgiving of 2011 I suffered a neck injury, a bulging disk that pinched a nerve. It was a freakish thing, starting that day with a sharp pain while bending over to pick up a paper I had dropped on the floor and yawning at the same time. By the end of that evening I was in severe pain at an ER and I spent two weeks on my back doped to the gills. It wasn't until this day five years ago that I began cautiously returning to running.
The reason I bring this up is that was the first time I had ever been totally out of commission running-wise since I began hitting the roads a few years earlier. I remember being pretty sure I was done running for a long time, maybe for good. I had pain every time I walked, hit a bump while driving, anything that caused the least little bouncing of my body. Particularly scary was when I tried to put a gallon of milk in the fridge with my left arm only to find I could not lift it high enough to get it onto the shelf. Hard to imagine doing much physically when you cannot arm curl a gallon of liquid a few inches!
Worse than the physical toll of that injury, though, was the mental part of having running suddenly ripped away from my life. I won't lie. I was seriously depressed for a few weeks there. I felt a real loss, almost as if a loved one had passed away. My drug cocktail probably wasn't helping things in that regard either, but I was shocked how much it was effecting me mentally. I felt similarly later on when I had to resign my coaching positions to move to Colorado. In both cases I really couldn't believe how difficult it was for me to rally and get through it emotionally.
As time goes on however I am coming to realize that it really only not being able to run (or coach) that was truly bothering me, though that was definitely part of it. Mostly it was because my identity as a runner (and later as as running coach) wad gone or in jeopardy of being gone. At the time of my neck injury I was living in tiny Lanark, Illinois, a town the size of which meant that everybody knows everybody else. Me and my family were a big part of the running community in the town. My wife and I had both run a marathon, I had started running some longer trail races and my son was making a name for himself in the area as a distance runner.
Suddenly I was questioning myself big time. If I could not run, if i wasn't that dude everybody in town always saw running around all the time, then who was I? I had a run of the mill, ordinary job. I didn't really "do" much, at least in my mind, except run. I was a runner. And the worst part was until i couldn't do it anymore, I hadn't even been introspective enough to realize how much of my identity was tied up with running. I was completely blindsided by the entire experience.
Eventually and gradually, with a lot of help from my chiropractor, traction, and time, my neck got better and I did return to running as before. And I think I learned quite a lot from the entire ordeal. When I had to give up coaching a few years later, and also had my running seriously curtailed by a bout of ulcerative colitis just before that, I like to think I handled it better. Maybe I did. Maybe not. What would happen right now if I faced another long stretch of time when I couldn't run? Or worse yet, couldn't run at all anymore? I can't say for sure.
Right now I am running more than ever. I recently had a streak of 41 days straight broken only because of a travel day to the Nike Cross Regionals to watch my daughter and her team. Last fall I ran my first ultra. From the outside it would appear that I am loving running more than ever and it's true. I am. It's kind of hard not to when you live fifteen minutes from their Rocky Mountains foothills! But I know that in part it's also because I am a small fish in a small pond and just trotting out some miles a few times a week just doesn't feel like it cuts it.
And that's ok.
Whew! Well that's enough off that!
"Running should be free, man."
Caballo Blanco
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