It’s Personal: Healing is Half the Battle

How can you keep an injury from getting the best of you?

By Kate Bongiovanni

The other day a friend told me I must have the patience of a saint. If only he knew. I can lie when I’m typing an e-mail or tweeting. I can shrug my shoulders when asked how I’m coping. I can repeat, “What can I do?” and “I don’t have much of a choice” when inquiring minds want injury updates. A stress fracture in your lower extremities will do that to you.

You tell yourself it’s OK when, really, it’s not. That’s what happened to me when I got the biggest blow to my endurance sports lifespan, a stress fracture in my left tibia and a prescription to take it easy and lay off running until further notice. When you’re someone who likes to joke that she has adult onset ADD—the only reason that might fully explain her crazy race behavior and inability to sit still—you don’t take that news lightly.

If only that friend knew what I had gone through. The skipped sweat sessions because I couldn’t bear the thought of another night pedaling the stationary bike. The tears pooling in my eyes when I spectated at a race that I wanted to be running. The frustration skiing green runs on a picture-perfect end-of-ski-season day when I should have been tearing up the fresh powder in the back bowls. The week when I laid on the couch wallowing in self pity. And that’s only the first month—the abridged version.

If only he knew what I was hiding from him—or opting not to tell—when asked for a status update. The disappointment of finally having running buddies but not being able to run with them. The reality of knowing that I can’t add triathlons and races to my calendar in case I need to bail altogether. The reluctance to plan an outdoor hiking adventure when I don’t even know if I’ll survive, pain-wise, past the first day. The daily reminder, the pressure on my inner leg that I try to ignore as it tells me I can’t run, practice yoga off my knees, or churn out centuries on my bike. The absence or tardiness at a running event simply because I’m tired of watching runners do what I can’t—and how badly I want to join them. The depression that kicks in when I know my body is not at 100 percent, I don’t know when it will be, and I literally have to modify every activity from yoga to folding laundry. And the biggest whammy: accepting the fact that I have to cancel a triathlon training camp I hoped to attend since returning from last summer’s experience, because my doctor, my family, and some of my close friends highly advised me against going.

If only he knew how badly I wanted a DeLorean time machine so I could go back to the future a la Marty McFly and Doc Brown. To fix that series of events in the space-time continuum that brought me to where I am today, bruised and battered mentally and physically. Like the June with a distance event every weekend—a century, a triathlon, a marathon, a 10-day Yellowstone-Teton camping trip. Like the winter devoid of recovery—two weeks of boot-camp workouts that felt great at the time but, in retrospect, were a root cause to this malaise, multiple weeks skiing hard in the mountains, training for the Boston Marathon, swapping full nights’ rest for cat-naps, and stretching for more exercise. Like all the other events that naturally weigh down a body, they do so even more when you don’t take the time to properly recover and regroup—or even train.

If only he knew the mistakes I’ve made. My rap sheet of athletic blunders is rather astonishing—and embarrassing. I should know better, understand that my body isn’t able to handle all those rigors even if I wanted it to. I learned the hard way 10 years ago when I woke up feeling like I’d aged 60 years overnight and was so stiff and achy I stopped running for the rest of the summer. But it’s easy to forget about that when you’re practically labeled superwoman because you rocked an event that you never planned to race in the first place and ran a personal-best marathon six weeks after your ankle felt like it was breaking beneath you. And it’s even easier to keep rolling full steam ahead because it feels good, not because it actually is. If I had been more careful from the get-go, I probably wouldn’t be in the situation I’m clawing to get out of now.

If only he knew the giant question looming in my brain: If I’m this crazy now, how can I keep this injury—or some other one—from happening again? It’s one thing to take a break from a sport you love because you want to. It’s entirely different to be forced, especially when those breaks stretch more than two months during summer’s prime and have the potential of lasting six months or more. And I’m practically set up for failure: Research says that once you get a stress fracture, you’re even more likely to get another one. Great. Thanks. Love ya, leg.

But what my friend doesn’t know is he has steadily kept my focus intact. I know I’ll be back out there soon—in some way, shape, or form—because I think I’d go absolutely nuts if my running days were truly over. But the question is when? I only have one race on the calendar, the marathon that became my A race by default when I failed to run more than a 10K at race pace six months prior. Surely my doctor will give me approval by then to run.

The only problem? How much of my sanity am I going to lose in the meantime? I doubt I can tolerate another near meltdown along a race course’s sidelines watching others do what I love without me. I can only be patient for so long before that patience runs out.