Some times injury can lead to rare and beautiful things.
Let me explain:
On Friday, Oct. 30, I suddenly and frighteningly felt
something snap in my knee, at the outside edge of the patella while running at a
training pace on a treadmill at my local gym. Luckily, I stopped immediately by
straddling the fast-moving track, escaping further certain injury.
I hobbled home and for that night and the next day left the
house only to see a doctor on emergency call. He hesitated to say what was wrong,
noting that I could bend and extend the leg without pain. But when I put any
weight at all on that leg, the pain was fierce. The doctor prescribed an MRI,
which I had on Monday.
Early Tuesday I went out for a walk. Using a cane I was able
to make it slowly up our Brooklyn block to a place where M and I typically stop
for coffee before continuing on up the street in order to give Thurber, our
cantankerous coonhound, a morning run in Prospect Park. The road to the park
from my house earns the neighborhood’s name, Park Slope, to a considerable
degree, especially noticeable when the best you can do is put about ten percent
of your bodyweight on one of your legs.
So on this day M continued up the vertical street, and I
stayed behind with my coffee and cane, sitting on a wooden bench fashioned
around a street tree.
Suddenly, my heart filled with the promise that comes of
seeing beautiful things in a brand-new way. I had never in my twenty-five years
that we’ve been living in Park Slope noticed the feathery glory of a mature exotic
cedar that grows across the street from our habitual café at First Street and
Seventh Avenue. The tree glowed a golden-crimson, the needles in the autumn light
the texture of angel hair. Not the pasta but the celestial wonder. Red bricks
on the building behind the tree reminded me for the first time in ages of our
year in Santa Fe, when we traveled to see the ancient structures of the
Anasazi, the dance rituals of the Hopi.
For the first time since I heard and felt that troubling
knee-snap, I smiled without irony, without a sense that my running days were
numbered.
I’d like to think that the days that followed form a direct
line from that upbeat insight. My injury turned out, remarkably and gratefully,
to be a bad sprain. I will miss the Brooklyn Marathon this Sunday (Nov. 15),
but I suspect I will be running again before the snow flies.
And I hope that I’ve learned a lesson. Not so much about
training and how to do it with more patience and awareness of what my six-decade-old
body can or can’t do (although, I promise to try). But more about the rewards
that come from truly slowing down, and seeing and taking in the beauty that is
all around the all-too-busy you.
Next: Running for
Your Life: Water Walking
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