“Why are you limping?”
“I’m not,” I replied.
Despite my confident assertion that the gentleman standing next to me was wrong, his reply carried kindness. “I can show you.”
He was a running coach, and played back the recording of my short spell on the treadmill. The limp was obvious.
“Are you injured,” he inquired?
“No.”I was puzzled, struggling to process what was going on. “I’m not injured at all. I haven’t had a problem with that leg since…” And then the penny dropped.
Several years before I had been training for the London marathon when I got injured. I rolled my place into the following year, and the same pain recurred. This was in the middle of the noughties – I haven’t been able to secure a place in the race ever since.
After experiencing the same issue in successive years I consulted all kinds of people, and they must have been all kinds of wrong, because the person who instilled most confidence in me – an expert in human motion – told me my body was probably not designed to run marathons. I gave up on any kind of long runs at that point.
The years passed and then I saw a promotion for a running clinic; it was one used by English Premier League soccer players, and the price of the sessions didn’t seem ridiculous. I turned up, jumped on the treadmill, and in the first few seconds I had my revelation.
I hadn’t heard of illiotibial bands, I didn’t understand the importance of core strength, stabilizing muscles, or running form, and I had no idea that my body was still carrying the memory of a trauma that had long since passed. Clearly it had only passed in the physical sense.
Running correctly again was a strange feeling, and it took some time before I was doing it without thinking. I recall my first attempts to put an even amount of weight on each foot. I remember my surprise when something deep in my mind leapt out of nowhere and violently braced itself for a shooting pain the split second before my foot made contact with that extra sense of conviction. There was no pain. My subconscious was confused, and at first didn’t accept this new reality.
It took several repetitions of conscious effort fighting subconscious instinct before I could get into any kind of groove. Even when I had earned enough trust from my subconscious that I was not trying to cause myself harm, running still felt wrong. Even when I could see in the mirrors surrounding me on the treadmill that I was running correctly again, I felt lopsided; I had been running out-of-balance for so long that what should have been natural felt wrong, and what was actually wrong felt natural.
This story isn’t huge. Many of us will have similar experiences we can share. In the grand scheme of things a bit of knee pain that my mind hadn’t worked out how to move on from wasn’t a big deal. But I think of the process I had to go through: at first I didn’t realize I had a problem, then when I was told about it I didn’t trust what I was told, and when I finally did accept it, I faced a battle within myself until what was incorrect stopped feeling right, and what was correct stopped feeling wrong. I try to remember that.
