October
“Hi, um, uh, soooo after hill sprints yesterday, my, like, kneecap has been really hurting. So much that it’s hard for me to run on it,” I said to Coach. I was so nervous to tell him that any part of me was in less-than-perfect condition. I’d run the warm-up, waiting to see if it would get better but hoping that it wouldn’t.
“Go to the trainers and get some ice, see what they say,” he replied.
I walked alone to the sports medicine office. Iliotibial Band Syndrome, an inflammation of the outside knob of the kneecap due to overexertion, was the diagnosis. Physically, it hurt like fuck, but I was so thankful for it—I could finally take a break.
Walking back to practice, I could only think about how all breaks come to an end. What would I do tomorrow if my knee felt better? Everyone would be faster than me, and I would have to suffer through practices again, which had become as competitive as The Hunger Games. I started to wonder whether I was really Coach’s “favorite,” or just a tool of his to make my teammates resent the attention and push themselves harder. Would I still be his favorite when I got back to practice?
I sat on a bench next to Coach and watched the other freshman run their mile-repeats. I was so uncomfortable; I wanted to break the silence by telling him that I promised I wouldn’t be injured tomorrow, and that I would run faster. Instead, I just watched my teammates thinking, Better than you, better than him, better than her, better than them. (I’m not proud of it now, but those were the little pieces I had to hold together to keep from breaking.)
“You know, if you weren’t a freshman—especially my favorite freshman—I would make you get back out there with the varsity kids and run your workout,” Coach told me.
I couldn’t help what my body did—I had muscles that ached every second of every day in all of these different places. The ache was like a trophy of how hard I had overworked myself. My body wasn’t mine anymore—just a tool. My body was a machine that got depleted and refilled.
November
“If you believe you are going to be on the state championships team, stand over here. If not, stand over there,” Coach directed us before a workout from hell. By then, I knew my place—“over there.” I teared up thinking about the beginning of the season, how Coach told me I could be the star freshman in the “Top Seven”: the seven girls who would race at the state championships, win, and then go on to nationals. Now look at me, I thought. Why was I even there? My body barely worked, and it was becoming harder every minute to tell myself that nothing was wrong within me. As long as I convinced myself that I wasn’t depressed, wasn’t an anxious mess, wasn’t waiting for someone to just push me off the side of the painful mountain I had built up, none of it would be true. The way I had learned to take care of my toxic stress was to deny that it was even there. This day was the day that I couldn’t ignore it.
I began the workout of continuous laps around the field at increasing speeds every seven minutes and kept up with the group that I was with. By the middle of the workout, my body couldn’t do it. It just couldn’t. No longer was it a matter of harnessing fear, anxiety, and a warped sense of reality to push myself through a run. I screamed from inside to just keep going. Threatening myself used to work, but it didn’t matter how many “tricks” I pulled out now. My legs were treading through an ocean that didn’t seem to exist for anyone else. I couldn’t deny anymore that what I was going through was not a universal circumstance. I couldn’t breathe, and I looked like death. Forget what Coach or anyone else saw. With my eyes and any possible telepathic capabilities, I begged someone to pull me out and force me to stop. Because I couldn’t stop on my own. My bones may have felt like rusty wheels and my psyche may have been self-destructive, but I was still a robot. My eyes squeezed back tears that I didn’t have enough energy to let fall.
Nashville was paused on the TV screen behind my mother, who was sitting on the other end of the couch, opposite me. Our house was quiet. She didn’t even have to say anything. My eyes began to burn like my muscles, which hadn’t stopped burning since summer. Except there was something eating my muscles now. It was more than a burn. It was deterioration.
The conversation was long, and I felt ashamed. If I had been the good runner that I was supposed to be, my parents would have been fawning over me instead of asking if I needed help. Real help. Dad had walked in right on time to join in on this desperate intervention. They had been trying to reach me for so long, but there were too many walls to break down.
“I want my girl back,” my mother said. It was what finally put a chip in the stone casing around my heart. We were in the car on the way to morning practice before school.
“I just want you back. I want my only girl back, please!”
The only other times that I had seen my mom cry was when the oncologist told her that her cancer was gone, and when Oprah was talking to a teenage girl whose mom had died from the same disease.
A month later, she and my dad forced me to quit the team.
I wasn’t jubilant about having to stop running. I was in physical therapy and therapy-therapy, and didn’t feel like I should be alive if I wasn’t at practice killing myself to become the runner that I was “supposed” to become. After this running war, I didn’t get that it was OK to simply be happy; that doing things that made you happy didn’t mean you were giving up or being weak.
My psychiatrist helped me understand that what I felt about my experience with long-distance running was completely valid. Now, they even refer to it as a “traumatic” time in my life: something I agreed with but, for too long, felt too ashamed to admit.
Sometimes when I talk to people I went to middle school with, they’ll ask, “Weren’t you that girl who set running records?”
I tell them about how my body just had to stop running, and how I can barely get through three miles nowadays when I used to run 12 in one go. On rare occasions, I’ll get the shocked follow-up, “But weren’t you supposed to be a state champ?”
“Yeah,” I’ll say. But I don’t really believe in “supposed to” anymore. ♦