Running for Your Life: So Slow That Everything Changes

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 cafĂ© 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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