The 10-mile race I was so excited to run was Saturday. And I wasn't in it.
Let's back up. I've been having progressively worse back pain over the past few years, basically ever since I graduated from college and started spending a lot of time sitting in front of a computer. I'm not handicapped or anything like that, but my shoulders and lower back get really tight and sore. Also, I have had some off-and-on pain in my hip after running that someone once told me might have something to do with my hips being out of whack. (I'm pretty sure that's the medical jargon for it.) Although my Mom swears by her chiropractor, I've always been pretty skeptical of them, what with them being uneducated witch doctors and all. (Kidding!) Nevertheless, when I got a coupon for a free exam and x-rays from a chiropractor who was recommended by some people in my running group, I figured I'd give it a shot.
The week after I got the !GREAT NEWS! from the Sports Medicine doctor that I would be OK to jump back on the wagon and finish training for the race, I went to see the chiropractor for the second time. We were going to follow-up on the x-rays and talk about his recommendations. He sat me down and showed me the x-rays of my back alongside someone else's x-rays. The other person's x-rays were meant to serve as an example of a 'good,' well-behaved spine. It curved in all the right places and had spacious, well-defined gaps between each vertebrae. It was a nice spine.
My spine, on the other hand, was slightly less admirable. It was mostly alright, really, until you got to my lower back and then things started to look a little off. Imagine for a moment that my spine is a highway and my vertebrae are cars. The x-ray looked a little like what would happen if the drivers of my bottom two vertebrae got distracted while driving (probably sexting or applying makeup, as young women are wont to do), and then when they looked up, the vertebra in front of them had stopped short and OOPS they bumped into them. Not real hard, just enough that the flow of traffic is all jacked up. So now my vertebrae cars are jammed and the spine highway isn't all curved and pretty like the one in the other exemplary x-ray, and suddenly I'm in a chiropractor's office feeling jealous of another woman whose skin I've never even seen.
The chiropractor's explanation for this was that either I was born with my vertebrae like that OR I injured my back at some point in the past and it healed that way. In either case, he said that there's nothing that can be done to change the fact that they're jammed together, but that he should be able to help get things better aligned and take some of the strain off my nerves and muscles. Doing so would take at least 4 weeks, and oh by the way, I shouldn't run during those 4 weeks because it would make treatment less effective.
So. After receiving all of this news I was... quite upset. Understandably. I was terrified that there might be something permanently wrong with my back, I was confused that he claimed I'd suffered an injury that I didn't remember having, I was pissed that he hadn't been more delicate and compassionate when he explained all this to me, and I was devastated that the possibility of running the race was slipping away again just when I thought everything was going to work out.
What's embarrassing is that of all these concerns, the thing I was most upset about was the possibility of not being able to run the race. Specifically, I was worried about what the people in the running group would think of me. On some level I was OK with the idea of giving up on the race, since I had just taken a month off training and I only had 3 weeks to get ready, but the idea that people would KNOW I had signed up for a race and then dropped out made me feel like a failure. When I signed up for the training group, I felt excited and proud that I was finally declaring myself a 'runner' who was comfortable associating with other runners. When I hurt myself and had to stop running, I consoled myself by thinking that I'd be healed up and back to training in no time. When everyone saw me return to training and then later run across the finish line, they would know that I was serious and not just a quitter.
But if I couldn't run the race after all, they wouldn't know how serious and determined I was. I'd just be some strange girl who had dropped out of training after 2 months and was never seen again. A quitter, and a failure, and a wanna-be. The idea of 'real' runners thinking those things about me was devastating, as embarrassing as that is.
Unfortunately, once I admitted to myself that the reason I was having a nervous breakdown over this whole thing was because I was afraid people would think bad things about me (and not, say, because I have TRAFFIC JAM SPINE), I had no choice but to do the rational thing and let go of the race. I emailed the handful of people from the running group that I had become friends with to let them know that I wouldn't be coming back to training after all, and whaddaya know, they were all really nice about it. Because of course they were. Because most people are mostly kind and good (I think), and this whole thing was really just about the Asshole Voice in my Head messing with me.
So I didn't get to run the race, and I was sorely disappointed, but I just keep reminding myself that I have a lifetime of races ahead of me if I want to run them, and this isn't the end of the world. As far as my back goes, I'm still a little skeptical of the chiropractor's explanations for why it's messed up, but there's no denying that those x-rays looked shady, and also no denying that my back pain has improved a lot in the past few weeks. I wouldn't say I'm a convert, exactly, but I'm less... openly dismissive, shall we say? At the end of this week he's supposed to take another round of x-rays, and if I don't like what he has to say then I SHALL SEEK A SECOND OPINION. From a real doctor, this time. Meanwhile, I've been cleared to ease back into running again (again), so I'll be working on that. Hooray! Thanks for checking in.
No comments:
Post a Comment