A lot of things are reminding me of other things today.
I had to tape up my feet today before running today for the first time. Well, just one spot where the remains of a blister isn’t quite healed up. But it reminded me of my short-lived gymnastics career, when more than once I had to tape my raw palms before getting on the bars. There were a few short months when the team at Massachusetts Gymnastics Academy was very interested in me. Turns out they thought I was 2 years younger than I was (I was a tiny child – hard to believe, I know, given the robust adult that I turned out to be – who didn’t break 5 feet until high school). After they discovered I was 9 or 10 instead of 7 or 8, the bloom was off of the rose.
I think the acme of this brief gymnastics phase was when I broke my arm at Cape Cod Sea Camps in August of 1984. My parents sent me to sailing camp and I broke my arm in the all-camp gymnastics meet. Suffice it to say that in the summer of 1985 I spent a lot more time in those floating bathtubs known as Mercuries. When I broke my arm, though, it was a real one: a compound fracture – both bones completely broken in two and sticking out through the skin of my left arm. I must have been in total shock because I remember looking worldessly down at my arm, discovering in awe that when I held my arm straight my wrist was at 90 degrees from where it ought to be.
I was taken to Cape Cod Hospital where I remember waiting for hours and hours in a freezing cold, over-air-conditioned waiting room in just the red-and-white striped leotard I’d been wearing in the meet. When I was finally seen it didn’t get any better. My parents declined to have me put under general anesthesia because they were not there, so the intrepid Cape Cod ER doctor had to set this double compound fracture under local anesthesia. There is not enough novocaine in the world to make that bearable. I remember watching them wrench my arm, trying to pop the bones back into vague alignment. I remember throwing up. What I don’t remember is crying, at all.
Unsurprisingly my arm had to be reset a month or so later. This was full-blown surgery, general anesthesia and my arm in traction while they rebroke it and set it again. I remember waking up in the recovery room to the concerned faces of Eric and Susie Vogt. My mum picked me up and we went to the Cambridge Tennis Club where I watched her match in the Indian summer sun. I famously threw up all over the lawn. General anesthesia and I have never gotten along well.
The broken arm is one of those memories of physical strength – like childbirth – that I marvel at sometimes. Clearly I DID those things, lived through them, survived, like a trooper (trouper?), I’m told – but somehow they don’t provide the kind of conviction about my strength that I wish they did.
The other thing that I thought about on today’s run was the half marathon that is 4 weeks from today. I printed out one training regiment and promptly discarded it. It was too prescriptive and detailed. My rejection of guidance here reminds me of the way I reacted to many of the new parent books that we all read voraciously in the first few weeks. In a demonstration of either stubborn arrogance or conviction to my intuition that reminds me of how I am approaching this half marathon training, I totally rejected those books. I bristled at the notion of being told when to wash the bottles and precisely what half hour to wake the baby up. It is unlike me, really, to defy authority in this way, and I wonder what gave me the gall to do so. Generally I like specific instructions (as anyone who has driven with me knows, I prefer the turn-by-turn kind of directions, rather than the “go north” kind) but in certain arenas I apparently don’t want anyone to tell me what to do.
Random thoughts on a gray Sunday.
Photo from the last leg of a long (but fast) trip this week. I read several books and a bunch of magazines on the trip, and found this exquisite poem by Mary Oliver (who has always been one of my favorites). I am so glad to be back, my return last night was positively lovely.
