The Long Dark Tea Time of This Runner’s Soul

I had become accustomed to the state of being broken and useless.

I had started to feel that maybe it was a normal state of affairs to grunt and groan as I moved about. Then, this week, a large orange ball came into my life and I am beginning to think that maybe things aren’t as hopeless as they seemed.

I’ve jumped right into the middle of a story there and maybe we should call up the wavy lines to float across the screen as I take you back in time to the start of 2020.

It was a happier, more innocent time back then. We all crowded together in small spaces and knew nothing about hand washing and what percentage of alcohol we should have in our hand sanitiser. I had been running through the winter holidays and was feeling great, apart from a niggling pain in my ankle. This pain got worse and eventually stopped me from running altogether.

I called up my private health insurance and they arranged for me to see a physiotherapist. Hurrah, thinks I. A bit of rest, a few exercises and I’ll soon be back running.

Three months, says the therapist. No running for three months. I was aghast, appalled and an unhappy runner. However, I did as I was told and embarked upon the exercises. Ankle felt a little better once I stopped running but always gave me pain first thing on a morning. Then I found that the exercises were making my ankle feel sore. The physio moved me to the next stage of exercises and then lockdown happened. No physiotherapist sessions for me. After a while they sorted themselves out and offered online sessions. Unfortunately I had now lost faith in the process. The change in exercises hadn’t helped and I was still feeling sore after every set of of them. I decided to stop.

So, that’s the story of my ankle.

But there’s more…

Crunch Goes The Shoulder

In the process of this they did slice up my Black Knight t-shirt. Perhaps he had previously had a bad experience with a satirical security officer.

A Slow Recovery

This happened on June 23rd and I spent several agonising months huddled on the corner of the sofa not daring to move as the tiniest movement would cause huge waves of pain to sweep through my body. Time passed and my muscles wasted away. My whole frame looked weirdly lop sided as the neck muscles and shoulders just vanished. I had more physiotherapy sessions now but this therapist had me attempting lofty goals such as moving my left arm a few inches away from my body. It was a slow and brutally painful process. The shoulder had been thoroughly smashed up and we had to wait until the bones fused together again and then attempt to make the whole thing function.

Now we are just nudging our way into November and I have attained the mighty super power of being able to raise my left arm above my head. I can’t hold it there for long but consider myself a super over achiever for arm movements and am expecting to receive a badge for it that I can sew onto my sleeve.

However, all that sofa sitting had not done me any fitness favours. Muscle had gone, fat had moved in and movement was a process that was always accompanied by grunts, groans and a remarkable lack of grace.

Eventually I resumed work and tried some of this moving about stuff. I do quite a bit of walking about and pointing at stuff at my work. I also like to get out in my lunch break to go see some nature and check that it is still there.

It was after one of these lunch time walks that my knee suddenly became desperately painful. To drive home I had to push the car seat all the way back and operate the foot pedals without Bending my leg. All extremely painful and massively awkward. I struggled on for a few days and eventually the pain wore off. Hurrah thinks I. Why not celebrate by attempting a run. One good reason why not is that it is a stupendously stupid thing to do.

And so it was.

I managed about a hundred yards before knee exploded into mighty supernova of pain.

I limped slowly back and felt terribly sorry for myself all mixed up with also feeling quite angry with myself too.

Much resting, elevating icing and compression followed and I bought a kind of knee sock thing, which seemed to help.

Once recovered I was possibly quite justifiably a little scared of trying to run again. I was getting fatter and more unfit so needed to do something. I was back at the stage I remember when I was 50. I felt lethargic and sluggish. There was a sort of haze of murkiness that seemed to weigh heavily upon my senses.

Of course, when you feel like that then it becomes even more difficult than ever to get yourself outside and moving, especially as we move into cold, wet and rainy season. However, it helped enormously that I’d managed to get myself reasonably fit before and I knew how good I would feel afterwards if I could manage to get out there.

A Glimmer Of Hope

I spotted an outdoor basketball court on the local recreation ground, that no-one seemed to be using. I played a little basketball at school when I was around 14 years old. I wasn’t very good but I at least knew the rudiments. I could bounce a ball, throw it at a basket and do a lay up on the basket. I would buy myself a big orange ball and try get some exercise with that before attempting to run again.

And so I did and it was a lot of fun.

I was still pretty terrible at it but running up and down the court, bouncing the ball, and then leaping up to bounce it off the backboard was really good exercise that didn’t place too much stress on a body that had become far too accustomed to inertia.

It is going to be a long climb back to fitness but I know it’s worth the effort.

Hoping very much I can avoid further injury…