I will not stop re-aggravating the same running-related boo-boo until the sun finally engulfs Earth
As Monty Python's Black Knight famously declared, it's only a flesh wound
About two weeks ago, I was running across uneven ground, which would have haughtily called me the uneven party if asked, when I managed to scuff the back part of the medial malleolus of my right ankle with the toe of my (mostly) forward-moving left shoe. As always, the skin there was bare; the affected area was about a centimeter above the top of the low-cut socks I’ve invariably worn while running since tenth grade, largely in an effort to erase all memories in all heads of the color-banded knee-length socks I wore exclusively in training and races throughout ninth-grade cross-country and track.
I probably said something like “Ow,” “Fuck!" or “Ow, FUCK!”, but didn’t consider stopping. When I got home, I noticed some drying blood on my malleolus (Latin for “little hammer”). To clean and disinfect the area, I showered, a commitment I undertake at least once a week whether I need it or not, and later that evening barely noticed the small scab that formed there.
Maybe two days later, this time while making a sudden-ish left turn on what passes for smooth pavement in Boulder, I hit the same area with the same shoe in the same way and expelled, to the best of my recollection, the same basic combination of involuntary primal noises and internalized expletives. When I got home, I saw a fresh drop of blood; I had knocked free the little scab that probably would have soon slid free from my little hammer on its own, perhaps in the following week’s shower session, after enough of the underlying skin had properly regrown.
As before, I did not seek out a band-aid for this boo-boo, because it did not require one. My only job was to not kick myself in my own ankle for a few days. As I had previously managed to avoid this sort of mishap entirely for nearly forty years, there was no reason to believe that I had embarked on a formal losing streak.
About two days later, this time while on a six-legged shuffle with Rosie, I managed to nick my thingie again. I probably should have anticipated this, since the other two times I had skicked myself on the go, I’d been jogging solo, and everything becomes both more interesting and more hazardous with Rosie along.
One more time, I had stolen bloody defeat from the jaws of epidermal-healing victory, when I couldn’t have been more than twenty-four hours away from scablessness and thus the option of kicking myself in the hammer without drawing blood, provided the kick wasn’t applied at the same angle and with the same force.
Today, I did again dislodged a nearly healed scab on the run, following a few instances of abrading the knobby, shiny upper portion of my little hammer while sitting at home mostly still. I will not diagnose or review the episode in any way, other than to admit to rubbernecking, or gawking. Or maybe just looking a little across the street. Not an accident, although a sight that qualified as a statistical likelihood.
By this time you can see why I feel like kicking myself for being a serial clod.
I have heard of weird injuries and boo-boos among runners that tend to come out of nowhere during a run thanks to a confluence of factors odd or mundane, then persist because it happens that the affected area is, while not load-bearing, unexpectedly vulnerable. For example, in the 1990s, one of my more prosocial friends developed a case of what I will call crotch-rot to protect the genus and species names of unwitting microbes. Itching kept him from running at all comfortably for weeks, and he was pretty fast as well as incautiously overpassionate. (I’ve heard of similar itching and burning issues with poison ivy, but this tends to clear up quickly.) And I know a couple of women runners who said they had trouble with wound healing in certain areas after certain non-essential surgical procedures, but people at least tend to see those coming.
On a more general note, when I experience an “unjustified” stumble, even when I am running downhill in an open-space mudslide, I hasten to attribute the incident to faltering balance secondary to encroaching senescence. I’m just going to assume my problem will go away without active intervention as I consider to bravely train though it. What am I supposed to do, run bowlegged with my ankles two feet apart? Maybe in hiking boots? That kind of shift would invite a different set of problems, like random passerby kindly pointing and saying, “There’s a public restroom one block that way, sir.” That or they would sidle off the path and load up the Boulder Daily Camera on their phones to see if any unusually florid characters were known to have escaped from any local nervous hospitals lately.
And finally, this seems like a good place to mention that Faith Kipyegon both blew away the women’s world record in the mile at the Herculis Diamond League meeting in Monaco yesterday and ran perfectly according to recent form (results).
Two women broke Mary Slaney’s 38-year-old American women’s mile record of 4:16.72, with the tranny pipping the Cranny to leave the track with the AR. This was impressive, even if these two and every other woman not from Kenya were in effect running a separate race from Kipyegon, and even if Nikki Hiltz’s unpublishable post-race Twitter bleating about the nonexistent crimes being perpetrated against trans people by legislators nationwide seemed more important to her than her new American record. Hiltz, Cranny, and Slaney, popped for doping in 1996, now stand 13th, 15th, and 18th on the all-time world list.