by Katie Arnold
What the HELL?
I’m less than a mile from the trailhead. I bend over to look at my knee; it looks normal. I try to run but can’t. It’s not painful as much as strange, as though something’s been yanked out of position. I limp to my car, trying to make sense of what happened. Only moments ago, I was clipping along, doing seven-and-a-half-minute miles. I felt a tug on the outside of my quadriceps and knelt down to stretch. I continued on, passing a Kenyan runner high-stepping in the opposite direction, when my knee made the awful sound. I hadn’t fallen or twisted it. It makes no sense.
Within hours of getting home, my knee has swollen with fluid, a massive ugly thing that does not resemble anything that belongs on my body. I can walk and my knee can bear weight, but with each step, the pain is sharp and searing. Even so, I don’t cry or panic. Maybe a microscopic part of me is relieved.
We think we know our bodies and our lives. I can run fourteen miles fast today and get up and do it again tomorrow. My knees are strong. They never give me any problem. I can run fifty miles or a hundred kilometers. I can win. The ego required to sustain this illusion of control can be tiresome, depleting, even as the running builds us up, makes us stronger and more confident than we’ve ever been. Beneath the formidable strength is our weakness: arrogance, the faulty assumption that we are strong and always will be. It takes work to carry this everywhere. Sometimes we want to put it down, rest awhile, remember we are human, and afraid, even though this terrifies us, too.
* * *
—
I can’t get in to see the orthopedist for two weeks. Impatient, I call a bodyworker, hoping he might be able to give me a prognosis. He wiggles my engorged knee, tells me to bend and straighten it, which is pretty much impossible.
“Well,” he sighs, “I hate to say this, but I’m almost certain you tore your ACL.”
No three letters strike more terror in an athlete’s heart than these. The anterior cruciate ligament is the connective tissue at the front of your knee that holds the whole joint together. It’s most commonly torn during twisting falls, eliciting a sinister, telltale pop. Skiers and soccer players blow their ACLs all the time. Complete or partial tears almost always require surgery, followed by six to nine months of rehabilitation. It can be a year before you get back to sports, and eighteen months before you return to your pre-injury form. If you get back.
Now I do cry. The whole way home in the car, sobbing on the phone to Anna. “My running. It’s over.”
That night, I Google “torn ACL symptoms.” I squint at knee anatomy diagrams from all angles. Assess the purple ligaments, the red muscles, the blue tendons. Try to figure out which one is responsible for the dull ache, the stiffness, the ominous buckling sensation, the feeling that someone has taken a hammer to my kneecap. There’s no way to tell from the crappy computerized renderings what has actually happened to my knee. The knee that I love and need. That I have lived with all my life. Scarred and strong and mine.
Uncertainty is uncomfortable. It’s not a place we like to stay. We fight it, try to outsmart it, convince ourselves we can control where our life will take us. In fact, we live here all the time, in the unknown, in flux. Only seldom are we awake to it. None of us knows anything, really, but this one moment and then the next. How have I forgotten this again?
* * *
—
When I finally get in to see the orthopedist, my knee is almost my knee again. Most of the swelling has subsided, though I’m leery of bending it too far, and I still walk with a halting limp.
The technician x-rays me and shows me into the examining room, where I give the doctor the recap: running, no fall, the cracking sound.
“Hmm, let’s take a look,” he says, pinning the films to the light board. He takes one look and cries out, “What the…?!”
It’s almost always a bad sign when a medical professional is so shocked he can hardly keep from swearing.
“You fractured your patella.” And then, because I must have looked confused, he says it loudly, enunciating every syllable for emphasis. “You broke your knee. Look,” he instructs, pointing to my ghostly kneecap on the computer, a half-moon, pale white and floating on the screen. I have to squint to see the break, straight and faint as a pencil mark. Even cracked, there is something dainty, almost precious, about my patella, this clamshell bone I’ve never seen before that’s done hard work every day on my behalf, the unsung laborer of long-distance running.
“I thought you said you didn’t fall?” he asks incredulously.
“I didn’t,” I say. “I was just running when I heard the tearing sound.”
He shakes his head slowly, as if this is the most messed-up thing he’s ever heard. My quadriceps, he explains, must have contracted so forcefully that it cracked my knee—a highly uncommon avulsion fracture that occurs without impact. In other words, I was running so hard I broke my own bone.
I’ve always known I have a high tolerance for pain, but I’m shocked to hear that I’ve been walking around for two weeks on a fractured knee. This cannot be good.
But when the orthopedist turns back to me, he’s smiling. I can tell from his face that it is good news. Fantastic news! Much, much better than a torn ACL or meniscus. He explains that my patella will heal on its own, without surgery, if I’m careful and rest for the next four to six weeks. “Normally I would put a cast on you, but since you’ve been walking on it for so long already”—here he shoots me a mildly reproving look—“and it hasn’t displaced, you should be fine.”
I nod earnestly. I’ve dodged a bullet, and I’m going to be a good patient. A patient patient.
“REST,” he repeats slowly, in that talking-to-a-deaf-person way. “Don’t even think about running.” As if running is even a remote possibility! As if I haven’t been limping around on a broken kneecap for two weeks and can barely bend it.
“Is there anything I can do?” I ask, a hint of desperation creeping into my voice. “Can I ride a bike?”
“No, I don’t want you torquing it.”
“Can I hike?”
“Nope. If you fall, then I will be putting screws in it.”
“Can I walk downtown?”
“How far is town?” I can see him trying not to laugh.
“Close,” I say. “And it’s flat.”
“Okay, you can walk to town,” he concedes. “But whatever you do, don’t trip on the sidewalk.”
“How about swimming?”
“You can swim if you need a little cardio.” He smiles, aware that this is the understatement of the century. “But not breaststroke. And put one of those floaty things between your legs and just pull with your arms. No legs for a while.” Then he turns to his nurse tech, rolls his eyes, and says, with an exaggerated sigh, “Runners are the worst!”
I’m so overjoyed, I forget to ask him about physical therapy or Advil or icing. He pats me on the back with a grin, and I practically tear out of there, flush with my good fortune.
* * *
—
The relief wears off almost immediately. It’s happened: I’m hurt. For real. I knew this day might come, but now that it’s here, the realization that I wasted time whining about running or imagining bogus injuries makes me want to beat my fists against the wall.
Without long runs to fill them, my days stretch out blank and empty. It’s torture to look at the mountains outside my window, blazing gold with the turning aspens, knowing they’re off-limits. I have endless hours to sit and write. Too many. If there’s a sitting-down disease, I’m going to get it.
On the good days, I try to be cheerful, grateful. There are much worse things. I know, because I’ve imagined them all. Real things that real people have had. Tumors, cancer, hantavirus, chronic Lyme disease, mass shootings, Ebola blowing into Texas like the plague. Comparatively, my broken knee is but a blip in the big picture. Anna emails, “It’s
a great opportunity to s l o w d o w n.” I know she’s right. I know I should look on the bright side. Now I have time to do all the things I wished I had more time for! Organizing the house, volunteering at school, editing my photos. Now that I’m not running all the time, Steve will not get annoyed at me for running all the time. Maybe this is just what our marriage needs!
Then I see people jogging down the street, and for a split second I despise them. I want to be them and I hate them. I try to be glad for my friends who run up Atalaya before breakfast, but I am small and mean, and I feel only jealousy. Worse, every day that I don’t run, I sense the anxiety skulking closer, looking for a foothold. What if the orthopedist was wrong? What if I did tear a ligament after all? What if I have a tumor in my knee that made it snap?
The first year that Maisy was a baby and Dad was dead and my worry was a living, breathing animal scrabbling inside me and I was so worn out I felt like my skin was peeling up around the edges like cracked paint, I often found myself visualizing a set of train tracks. On days when I awoke feeling especially bedraggled, I’d imagine sprawling out in the middle of the tracks and letting the trains run over me, back and forth, again and again and again. In this scenario, I never died, nor was I trying to. Dying was the last thing I wanted. What I wanted was to learn how to stop resisting so much and give myself over to the mayhem, to allow myself to be flattened into submission over and over.
It was a relief to lie there on the tracks in my mind. It demanded total acceptance. Maisy is waking six times a night and Pippa is projectile vomiting? Yup. I’m just lying down in the tracks. It was its own weird kind of meditation: made up and a little loony, but mine. Immobilized, I was pinned to my place in this inexplicable, spinning world, in this one exact moment. Fully conscious and finally present.
Then I would get up from my railroad tracks, feeling better, and go back to changing diapers and putting Pippa back to bed for the twenty-ninth time in fifteen minutes, and the moment would pass and I would be able to breathe again.
This is what being hurt feels like. I’m just lying down in the tracks. For six weeks, then eight. I postpone indefinitely my Grand Canyon speed attempt, accepting the incontrovertible fact of what is: My knee is broken. All I can do is try to burn through some of my excess energy doing leg lifts and crunches, like when I was eleven and scissor-kicked to the Jane Fonda workout video after school. I sit outside and soak up the October sun and let my bones absorb the vitamin D and practice a radical palliative optimism that sometimes feels almost possible. Healing is training, too.
For four years, ultra trail running has been teaching me how to let go: of my grief, my father, my anxiety and anger; of ego and expectation; of my daughters as babies and toddlers. The lessons never end, they just keep shifting. Maybe now ultrarunning, like the wise mentors whose students eventually outgrow them, is trying to teach me how to let go of running, too.
28
The Long Way Home
PHOTO: KATIE ARNOLD
Pippa, Santa Fe, 2015
Running has a way of bringing you full circle. Whether you run a loop, an out-and-back, or a long point-to-point, up mountains or down, you almost always come back to where you started.
By winter my kneecap is healed. Except for some minor stiffness, it’s hard to tell it was ever broken. I ski when it snows and hike fast up Sun Mountain with my black Lab puppy, Pete, who, at sixteen months, is finally old enough to start running. The trail cuts up the south face in full sun all day, so it’s the first in town to lose its snow. We hike to the top, run down. The next week, I run halfway up, walk the steepest pitch, and run back down. I’m careful with my goals. I don’t want to want too much too soon.
My first day back on Atalaya, I go slowly, remembering something the orthopedist had said. “You might be brewing some arthritis in there,” he said, pointing to my knee. That was his story, but it might not be mine. I could choose another story. In that moment I saw my anxiety as a sort of savagery, a way to punish myself for old crimes and shames by beating my body down with fear and imaginary ailments. But my body is not the enemy. It is my truest lifelong ally.
I love you, body, I whispered to myself as I ran. Thank you.
There are people who will tell you that running is harmful, that excessive exercise is just another form of abuse. But running teaches me to trust my body. It’s one of the best ways I know to love my body, and my world. For now my body is healthy and strong, but someday it might not be, and so it’s important to love my body, even when I’m afraid of it. I love you, body, I practice saying into the mirror. I love you, body, out loud in the mountains. Thank you.
Coming back from injury is as mental as it is physical, and there are days when my knee aches and worry creeps back, wobbling in the corners of my consciousness like a loose tooth. But I no longer grip it the way I once did. My ear still rings, but I don’t hear it—I’ve stopped listening. I’ve begun to think of my anxiety like layers of unstable snow buried within the snowpack. Each layer corresponds to a storm that can be traced back in time. On the surface, the slope may appear pristine and stable, but beneath this veneer of uniformity are hidden layers of rotten snow that make the slope prone to sliding. You can dig a snow pit and scan for anomalies—a prolonged thaw, a wet storm, erratic temperatures—just as you might read rings in a tree stump that reveal severe droughts, evidence of old trauma.
When you ski on fresh snow after a storm, it sometimes makes a soft whumphing sound, a deep, hollow settling. This is the snowpack compacting, holding. But under the wrong conditions, the outward force is great enough to cause the top layer to push down on the weaker layers with a pressure that they are unable to withstand. The whole slope collapses, the avalanche carrying everything in its wake, snow and boulders and trees tumbled over like pick-up sticks.
All my life I’ve been laying down my base. I’m lucky. It is mostly solid and strong, stable at the core. But I know my weak layers, the jolting, destabilizing shocks: Dad’s leaving, the attack on the trail, his letter and death and the anxiety that followed. With every year, the stress of these storms is buried deeper beneath all the very best and happiest layers. Now, when there’s a blow, I might wobble, but I will settle. I will hold.
Once I went to see a psychic. In Santa Fe, people recommend psychics the way they might a hairdresser. You can ask a stranger in the grocery store and no one will give you a funny look.
This was in the spring of 2013, when my tinnitus was at its deafening worst, when I was scared all the time. I could hear the South Pacific lapping in my ear and, above that, a swarm of mosquitos operating Weedwackers around the clock, and I was trying to heal it with homemade remedies and leaking so much garlic oil from my ear that I smelled like an Italian grandmother’s kitchen. I decided to have my charts read, under one condition: I wanted to know my future only if it didn’t involve a brain tumor. I was getting up my courage to tell the psychic this when she said, “I’m not a medium or a prophet.” She told me she specialized in “awareness” of past lives.
She closed her eyes and sat quietly for a moment. Then she said, “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes”—so many times and in such a mesmerizing way that I didn’t know who she was talking to or if a response was expected, from me or anyone else.
“This is a story of darkness, of shadow,” she announced. “This person was clinging to a tree in a storm on the shore of the ocean. There was a fierce wind, like a hurricane.” Here she paused. “It wasn’t the water that killed her”—apparently the person was a woman and I was to extrapolate that she was me, or I was her—“but the wind. She was at home by the water. The sea was her home.”
I watched her, and never once did she open her eyes. I marveled at this: how she could sit cross-legged on a sofa and talk for an hour about my calamitous soul without checking at least once to make sure I hadn’t fled the room.
“She was trying to save
her child, who had gone into the water. The child lived, but she was swept away.”
There in the room, I felt tremendous, objective sadness—not for me, but for this person who might have once been a version of me. That she had saved her child but lost her own life. The shock of it seemed to stick to my soul. Maybe it had been there all along.
She said, “One moment, one moment, one moment,” and the words hummed off her lips like they were coming from someplace beyond her. “It’s a feeling I get from your father. You loved him deeply and were very attached. He called you forward from the sea. He was the one who summoned you into being.”
The room was cluttered with Buddha statuettes and candles in the shape of Buddha statuettes, but her awareness didn’t come from any of them. It had an invisible source. I didn’t question or doubt any of this. What was the purpose? It changed nothing. It was just one version of one story. But as terrible as it was, if I contorted my brain and squinted out of one scrunched-up eye, it was also comforting. Had my father moved into another form, and would I someday call him forth, too?
When I got up to go, the day was just as I’d left it, except all the wrinkled parts of the world had shaken out to show their sharp, beautiful edges.
* * *
—
In early April, I’m on the phone with Lesley when she casually mentions that she’s going to run the Fodderstack 10K in a few weeks.
“The wha—?” I ask, stunned.
“I’ve been training all winter!” she says proudly.