What I have to live with.
the reluctant gifts of an injury
I slipped my feet into the stiff, new Birkenstocks. My mom and I dropped into Dryer's on 9th to find me a new pair last week. My old ones were worn and the cushion gone. Normally a new pair of sandals wouldn't be worth writing Home about, if it weren't for the plantar fasciitis that I have to live with. A new pair of shoes is the ultimate reminder of my chronic pain, my limitations.
A few years ago, I started running to manage my stress and set an ambitious goal to work toward, lest I remain sedentary all winter long. I loved the solitude of running, the rhythm, and my specially curated running playlists (music being the thing that got me out the door most days.) To train for the Colfax Half Marathon, I powered through illness, erratic Colorado weather, and an extremely busy work and ministry life. I persisted, and I put in the miles so I could put in the miles.1
When I began to develop shin splints a few weeks before the race, I got a new pair of Brooks. They were a perfect fit at the store, springy and cushy, but I couldn't get them to break in and they wore blisters on my feet with each attempted session. When I was forced to take critical time off recovering from the blisters, important training sessions went by the wayside. I didn't get out and run every time I meant to while I nursed my feet and shins to prep for race day. I'd try to play catch up from time to time, which is tricky.
What I decided in the eleventh hour: to run the half marathon in my old trail-road hybrid Sauconys2 I'd been crudely training in all spring.
What I couldn't admit then: I probably shouldn't have run the race. I hadn't found the right shoe replacement yet, and I knew I wasn't trained for the full distance.
What I didn't consider at the time: how harmful the combination of the wrong footwear and under-training could be for me.
I finished the race in May 2019. Very slow, but steady. After more than a week of recovery, I felt something was off. Not only did my shins hurt (I expected this since I'd chosen shin splints over blisters when I laced up my old shoes on race day) but each step was painful. When I walked, my heels felt like they had pins under them. Barefoot or in shoes, it didn't seem to matter. I decided to take a couple months off running to heal the suspected plantar fasciitis and shin splints.
A couple months turned into three years, which I know you already saw coming from 13.1 miles away.
The pain and sudden loss reminded me of the challenges and aches of dancing en pointe when I was a ballet dancer. Hours in class and rehearsals would cause blisters and bunions and sore arches, but I couldn’t get enough. The way I felt focused and confident while dancing couldn’t be replicated outside of the studio. It was where I felt most like myself. Though I’d put in a lot of blood, sweat, and actual tears, I quit dance in high school when my family moved to Missouri where there were no studios in our small town where I could take classes. I was heartbroken because I’d lost my thing.
I didn't know the move would cost me dance.
I didn't know the race would cost me running.
I grieved the loss of running, but not before I tried all the therapies in that first year and a half post-race: aggressive physical therapy, dry needling with electrical stimulation, custom orthotics, training with a certified personal trainer, targeted massage, professional stretching and reflex therapy, oils and potions, kinesiology tape, compression socks, tossing out all of my favorite shoes, and quitting running and hiking and long walks altogether. My feet would find relief for a while, but they’d inflame again for no rhyme or reason.
The treatments and attempts at a cure prolonged the grieving process. I hadn't realized what running meant to me until I lost it. It was how I managed my stress and anxiety and my over-full life. It was an effective distraction from jaw pain, vertigo, and other weird ailments I had at the time. When I started seeing a counselor a few months after the race (unrelated to the onset of the injury itself), I often found myself crying and working through how much I missed running, how I didn’t know how to cope or get by without it. How it was my therapy. My wellness. My thing.
My counselor suggested I try yoga or lifting weights or swimming – things that would be easy on my feet. So, I tried CrossFit because I can be stubborn and slightly contrarian and I had a Groupon.
I was not what most would call “good” at running: poor endurance, slow pace, low mileage, injury-prone. I was merely determined so I made it work for a while. But CrossFit? I was terrible. CrossFit was not ever going to be my thing for many reasons, but the clincher is that it made my feet hurt worse than before.
I longed for the simplicity of running: shoes, music, just me on the open road. I found CrossFit to be a tornado of equipment and acronyms and moves I was unfamiliar with and couldn't catch on to. I couldn't hack the learning curve while my feet screamed this isn't working.
With my tail between my legs, I walked home from the CrossFit box for the last time, right into the the conclusion that I'd finally try yoga since it felt like the exact opposite of CrossFit.
At first, I never got off the floor, which I now know as a grounding practice. All I could do were seated poses and stretches because standing barefoot, even on a mat, hurt my heels. I was so annoyed how little it resembled running – how little I reaped the same mental and physical benefits. How little I could escape my mind, get into flow of runner’s high, and get lost in the movement.
Some days, I acquiesced quickly into child's pose and would stay there, meditating on how my body felt instead of how I could make it move. Child's pose and shavasana (corpse's pose) are still the hardest poses, in my opinion, because they reveal what's just beneath the surface, that which is allowed to bubble up once you stop moving. But I had to be still and quiet to hear it. What I heard was “it’s okay to be sad you lost running (and it’s okay you’re still sad about losing dance)” and “this isn’t your fault” and “you can still find movement you enjoy”.
I put in the miles so I could put in the miles.
Yoga became my sanctuary, the place I arrived to each day scared and disappointed I couldn't run, leaving the mat more resilient day after day. It wasn’t running’s replacement. That’s an unfair comparison, though I tried to force that square peg into a round hole for quite a while.
When I just let yoga be yoga, it clicked. Through the grounding, I felt the rising.
Yoga is a meaningful part of my life now the way running was. It was a lifeline for me during the pandemic and what feels like fallout these last few years. It was my safe place when my body protested the stress of lockdown and the snowball of losses and cumulative grief. Through hours of practice, I’ve learned how to find flow and something akin to a runner’s high that I thought I’d never find again.
I’m not training for anything (just life, really), but I look forward to doing it in the afternoon, a threshold between my workday and my evening since they both take place under the same roof (sometimes in the very same room.) I’ve found ways to make it irresistibly simple: mat, headphones, and music or DownDog App. Oh, and breath.
It’s the doorway I walk through to prepare myself for prayer or meditation or silence, to join my mind and body and spirit (yoga literally means “yoke” or “union” in Sanskrit.) I first established this union in ballet, and then in running. Now, this practice is a recentering and reintegrating back into my realest self, where I measure success not by miles or reps or turns, but by integrity and wholeness.
It used to be where I was most reminded of my limitations and chronic pain, and now it feels a bit like recovery, like freedom. And in its own special way, yoga feels a bit to me like dancing.
Coupled with somatic therapy, yoga is where I embody healing. It’s where I learned to release myself of guilt and disappointment that I "ruined my feet". I hurt them, yes, but are the parts of us that are in pain truly "ruined”? Not hardly. Those parts simply crave a tenderness they’ve never been shown. For me, that’s been true from the time I shoved my feet into pointe shoes and had to pack them away forever, and the time I pounded pavement for over 13 miles in the half marathon and couldn’t run without pain again. This is how I keep walking toward my life, along with the parts I just have to live with.
You'd never have found me doing yoga if I could still run (and not CrossFit, either.)
You'd never have found me horsepacking through the wilderness if I could still run (I needed a horse to carry me. I can’t get very far on my own two feet anymore.)
In my journey to healing my feet and heartbreak, there hasn't been a cure. A cure, I think, would imply I no longer have pain, that I could return to running, and wear any shoes I wanted. Healing, for me, has been learning to live with the pain, and embracing new ways of being after loss. It’s meant growing to be “okay” even if I can’t run (like, ever again.) It’s becoming familiar with my pain and giving my body what it needs instead of shame for breaking down, which was the only reasonable response to the conditioning I put her through.
There were two desperate runs in the year after my injury: one 3 months post-injury in Beirut on the treadmill at my hotel, and another 6 months post-injury on the blacktop my parents live on in rural Missouri. Each time I thought, I’m tired of waiting. This time maybe it'll feel different. Each time, I left the run hurting and limping home after less than 3 miles.
I can’t count those runs failures, but moments I’d reached my limit of waiting. I realized after the second run: running wasn’t the fix. It would cause immediate change, but not any good kinds of long-term change. I had to move on. I couldn’t seek out running. I had to seek out healing.
I’m healing, but not in the ways I thought I would (in my small imagination it would’ve included running, obviously): I don’t cry anymore when I talk or write about running, or become resentful or jealous when I see other runners doing what they love. I am not ashamed of the sturdy shoes I can wear my custom orthotics in (soft footbed Birkenstocks excepted.) I prioritize getting massages and somatic therapy. I consistently practice yoga and meditation and sometimes I even dance. And I am working—however imperfectly—to embrace the gifts I walk into that I wouldn't have encountered if my feet were perfect (which hasn’t been since I was about 11 years old, before the pointe shoes.)
I had assumed my injury would self-correct and I’d be back to running in a few months, a year tops. What if I had waited on a cure? I’d have been waiting for years. Three of them, at least. In those three years, I’ve made progress and changed course when the old ways stopped working.
Maybe someday I’ll run once more—I’d like to run again—but I’m not waiting for when I can run. Until then, I’ll slip off my fresh Birkenstocks next to my mat where I’ll sit down and begin with what I have to live with, yet again.
It’s not a cure, but it’s healing.
Happy trails (however we’re getting down them),
From Brendan Leonard.
I only mention brands of shoes here to distinguish them for the story. Nothing at all against Brooks or Saucony: I ran in the wrong shoes for me.