steps

I used to consider myself a runner, but it has been years since my shoes have seen any significant milage. It was a status I was proud of, even though I was never fast. In high school, I ran cross country and only made the varsity team my senior year (much to the chagrin of my coach) because all the fast kids graduated and they needed to fill the spot. I wasn’t appreciably faster then than my freshman year, only gaining a few seconds over those years running through the tropical heat.

Five years ago, I started noticing that my legs were cramping up badly when I ran up hills. Soon, they were cramping up when I was running at all, then locking completely. I went from running three miles a day to barely being able to walk up a hill without pain, and with no explanation forthcoming from doctors or physical therapists (it’s your soleus muscle! and we don’t know why!) I have been left to stagnate in frustration. I ran my last 5K in the spring of 2012 and was in so much pain that I crossed the finish line in tears. I have tried to ease back into running several times since then, slowly and with lots of stretching, but always ended up with crippling pain when I ran for more than a few minutes at a time.

Lately, I’ve taken up a different kind of exercise to try and get back into the shape I lost with this mystery condition, some video workouts that I can do in the basement while the dogs watch. They are no joke, I can barely keep up with them, but they seem to do the trick. Once I had some conditioning back, I decided to try and ease into running again. Somehow, for the last five weeks, the combination of strength and flexibility training has held my mystery muscle locking at bay.

Until today. I don’t know if it was because I pushed a little further and harder than I have so far, or if my new running shoes aren’t doing the trick that my old shoes did, but for about half of the run, the pain was shooting fire up my legs and causing my already plodding pace to slow to a hobbling shuffle. And yet, I managed to get through the whole half hour run, something I couldn’t have imagined doing even two months ago. In the past, the pain has been so bad I’ve had to call Pete to come pick me up. Not so today, and for that I am grateful.

Pain is a funny thing. As soon as I stopped running and gave my calves a little stretch, the searing sensation that had been consuming my thoughts and emotions (so frustrated! and disappointed! with every step on this last run) disappeared completely and I could barely remember how badly I was hurting or how despairing I had felt for the last half hour. I’m already looking forward to trying again tomorrow, and hopeful that I was just imagining how badly I was hurting today.

We talk a lot about pain in nursing school, about how to manage it with methods from drugs and more drugs to movement,  aromatherapy and breathing, to frank distraction. We talk about how it affects not only people’s lives, but their emotions and outlook. Theories of pain have evolved over the years, but it is intriguing to me that we still don’t know exactly how pain works, or how acute pain evolves into chronic pain, or how conditions like fibromyalgia leave patients having pain triggered in their nerves and brain before any physical stimulus occurs.

For myself, as frustrating as this mystery condition has been, I know I am incredibly fortunate that it is one that can be managed. I am not in pain all the time, and it seems that I am slowly working my way around it so that I can still do the things I enjoy. But that nagging fear of chronic pain, of a lifetime of being unable to escape its burning grasp, is still around every corner, every twinge of muscle, every time I climb a hill and feel my legs begin to cramp and set themselves on fire or get out of bed and feel my calves locked down to leave me hobbling for half and hour in the morning. I have seen what that kind of debilitating pain can do to a person, and to a life.

But despite today’s twinges, I am hopeful for the first time in a long time, that my legs can relearn to do what they loved to do for so long, and let me run without pain for a long time to come.