Learning to sit with it

On February 3rd 2022 I tore my ACL. And my MCL, and almost everything else in my knee, oh and I fractured my tibial plateau. I knew in the moment it happened, that whatever happened... was not good. And deep down I knew that my ACL was toast. Time stood still. At first there was denial, disbelief and the weird hope that I would be back to normal in no time. I limped into the orthopedic surgeon's office the next morning and my leg was so swollen he really could not tell me what the diagnosis was, but said that I probably had torn my ACL. They ordered an MRI and sent me downstairs to be placed in a custom brace. At this moment, I felt like I was moving through a silent movie and somehow all I could hear was the sound of my own sniffling as the tears ran down my face. Everything went in slow motion...I limped into the brace fitting office, I hobbled awkwardly out, and I went to work, determined to have a normal day. And I did 5 surgeries and I worked until 10pm. Something had to be normal that day and there was absolutely no way that I was going to let any sort of physical injury prevent me from doing one of the two things that has always allowed me clarity.... surgery.

And then there was reality. There was the MRI, the brace, the swelling, the pain, the realization that I actually could not really bear weight on my left leg. And the amazing color purple and green that my knee started to turn as a few days went by. I knew the MRI results before the doctor explained it to me (one perk of working in the medical field), but somehow hearing it from someone with the authority to deem it so made me crumble into a million pieces in the doctors office. Never in a million, trillion years would I have expected to tear my ACL. Never. And at that moment I was frantic for surgery and angry at everything. The next day the sun came out after fresh snow, and it was gorgeous out. I drove to the nearby state park with my dogs and I limped 1/4 of a mile to a field and tried to walk to the other side and could not. So we stood at the edge of the glistening snow and I threw the ball. The dogs were happy. I was not.

I somehow thought that this was not really happening, and that I would be back to normal in no time. What ensued was a 17 month journey that is not over yet. I consulted with multiple surgeons, physical therapists, friends who had been through the process and I started to realize that no one was going to be able to tell me how to do this. I had to work this out on my own and I had to learn how to sit with it. I could not run my way out of this, I couldn't study my way out of this, I couldn't take a test, pass a course, speed it up. I had to learn to sit with it.

Being an ultrarunner and an endurance athlete, we pride ourselves on knowing how to suffer. We know that we can go farther, last longer, and probably endure pain more than your day to day average Joe. As an ultrarunner and a surgeon, what I do not have.... is patience. If there is a mission to complete, a task to be done, or a goal to accomplish, it seems ever and always reasonable to be able to complete that task and there is no excuse for not following through with the goal you set, the issue you had, or the problem that needed to be solved. Do or do not, there is no try. Until time stops. And you can't. And you feel like you're going to explode simply because you can't move. And movement is everything. It's freedom. It's an escape from anxiety, it's a moving meditation. It's the ability to process your thoughts while listening to your own breath and heart beat. And then "poof", you're still. But your heart is still beating. Your mind is still racing. And now your outlet is gone.

Things get real basic at this point. It's very weird. You take a normal thing that you were able to do a second ago, which is to move normally and walk or run, and you lose it. In an instant. You will never understand how much you will hyperfocus on a lack of mobility until you are faced with the reality that you cannot and will not be able to move like you once did for up to a year or longer. And the amazing thing in this moment is that your body adjusts. I went from running a trail marathon in a morning and being disappointed with my performance to being ecstatic to have walked 0.5miles in a giant brace with trekking poles. You just keep trying. And your whole world shifts and feels foreign but somehow you make it yours... because at the other end is movement, and freedom, and the chance to run again in the mountains with your dogs and your friends.

But in that space, there is time. There is the time where you rehab, and the time where you prep for surgery and the time after surgery and the time when you start real post op PT. And during that time your body is not yours and your movement is not yours. The whole world goes on around you and you have to find a space where you can process the loss of the world you knew and accept how to move forward. And in that space you learn acceptance and how to sit with it. I'm not good at that. I am a fighter and a person who won't accept things she does not want to accept. No one can tell me I can't, until my body did. And my outlet, my safe space and my place in the world was not accessible. And I missed it. Then a shift happened. A weird shift. Instead of running because I felt like I needed to run to be a human and to feel whole and like I could not survive without running, I began to realize that running was something I appreciated, and I enjoyed and I needed for recreation but not to survive. I realized that all of the work that I had done and the miles I had traveled had helped me to become a stronger and more resilient version of myself than I could have ever imagined. I was still that person even if I could not put on my running shoes every day. Somehow sitting with my feelings, and my anxiety and my trauma and reflecting on the journey that brought me to run in the first place... all of it... made me realize that over time I do not run to stay alive anymore, I run because I am alive.

June 30th 2023 was my first day back in the mountains running, and I am forever grateful.