A Little Less Careful

We lined up in the foggy chill before sunrise. Half a dozen of us were waiting for the pool gates to open for the 5:30am lap swim. Behind me, two of the morning swim elders quietly chatted about an acquaintance who’d recently been hospitalized for a severe infection. “It all started because she got a scratch while she was gardening. We need to be careful at our age.” 

As I moved through my 30s and 40s, I had developed a habit of becoming less careful as I aged. I’d learned to swim, surf, mountain bike, and boulder in the 8 years since I’d moved from the east coast to northern California at the age of 36. While I occasionally swam laps to support my surfing, I was only at the pool on this particular morning because I was rehabilitating a serious injury—I’d dislocated my knee during a mountain trail run while training for an endurance event. 

The injury came as I began a return to regular running nearly 10 years after my last marathon. Back then, constant hip pain and a string of incorrect diagnoses for its cause led me to believe my days of racing marathons, half marathons, and duathlons were over. I had a painful break-up with the high-mileage version of myself and wondered what I’d do with all the free time. My life got smaller and I became more careful. 

After settling in California, I found a chiropractor who had a hunch about my hip and sent me for x-rays. It turned out that the pain and immobility my previous doctors had misdiagnosed because I was “too young to have arthritis” was, in fact, arthritis. I focused on strengthening and, with time, I was able to sit and walk without pain again. When I could tolerate carefully running the 4-mile trail around a local lake once a week, I considered it a win. I filled the remaining 6 days of the week with my other new-found sports. Life felt more expansive again and I became a little braver. 

The fact that I had come to explore so many new activities still surprised me. I was a shy, introverted kid who largely preferred the company of animals and books to people. One frightening swimming experience as a child left me so uncomfortable with water that I couldn’t tolerate a dental cleaning or face head-on into a shower’s spray well into adulthood. There were occasional glimpses of bravery—like the teen years where I was the only girl on a boys’ hockey team—but I mostly preferred to stay quiet, careful, and unnoticed. 

In adulthood, my relationship with running started mostly as an accompaniment to disordered eating and attempts to change my always-a-little-curvy frame. But my continued exploration of endurance distances uncovered a strong desire to test myself and revealed a talent for piecing together the jigsaw puzzle of training. By the time I’d moved across the country, healed my body, and was again able to lace up my shoes to trot that 4-mile trail around the lake, I was in it for healthier reasons: the quiet of the redwoods, the loamy soil underfoot, and the sparkle of the watershed reservoirs set against the backdrop of Mt Tamalpais. I loved the mountain and its foothills with a fervor that was only matched by the passion I had for paddling out into the surf at dawn. On my ideal days, I’d have time for both: running the mountain trails above the surf break after catching my fill of sunrise waves. 

Slowly, I got less careful with my running. One of my sisters convinced me to participate in a virtual COVID-19 mileage challenge, where we logged a total of 100 miles over a few months. As the world reopened, my mileage continued to creep up and I once again set some race goals. I put a 10-mile race on the calendar, mostly because the course went over the Golden Gate Bridge and gave me echoes of my Verrazano Bridge crossing the year I ran the New York Marathon. Then I ran a pair of challenging 10ks on the trails that I loved.

I found my local Trail Sisters chapter, and seeing a community of awesome women undertake physical challenges added fuel to the fire. The more success stories we hear, the more we start to imagine that we might be able to push our own limits too. It certainly makes us that much less careful, because every time we choose to move our bodies we ultimately choose strength and bravery. This might mean overcoming a physical or mental challenge, facing the potential dangers of moving through the world as a woman, or assessing the inherent risks of being active outdoors. On the most difficult days, it might mean getting up and doing any form of movement we’re able to, just so we can keep going. We walk the line between brave self-care and being careful.      

When my injury occurred I was training for 29029, a 36-hour event in which the goal is to complete enough loops of a mountain course to reach 29,029 feet of accumulated vertical gain—equivalent to the height of Mt Everest. I was having an easy zone 2 trot on a Mt Tamalpais trail when my knee dislocated. It happened out of nowhere, and all I can remember is that it felt like the whole joint simply exploded. Two women were hiking toward me and saw my fall. Luckily their cell phones were working in that area of spotty service and they were able to call 911. I couldn’t get out under my own power and had to wait for a rescue team to carry me out.

Mentally, I beat myself up for my apparently brazen carelessness. I’m a tentative surfer and don’t go out in big conditions. I know the limits of my mountain biking skills and stick to mellow trails. I don’t push myself on unrealistic routes at the climbing gym. But I’d never considered the possibility of not being able to get off this familiar trail on my own. 

The dislocation was a complex injury, with lots of soft tissue damage and vascular complications. For months, everything I did required extreme care. Getting from the couch to and from the bathroom left me bonked. It was weeks before I could safely wash myself. I slept in a cocoon of pillows to prevent any movement that could cause a re-dislocation in my sleep. Nothing felt safe. My hours were filled with doctors’ appointments and office visits for physical therapy, acupuncture, and chiropractic care.

As I write this reflection, I’m in late-phase recovery. I’m not running yet, but I can hike and bike a little. When I return to running, I know I will face the voices in my head telling me to be careful and trying to talk me out of attempting technical trails. I spend a lot of time at the gym building the strength to protect my knee, and in the pool keeping my cardio up. My pre-dawn swimming companions all have their own challenges that bring them there, as I’ve learned over the past few months: Miriam, whose daily swims went from being a healthy habit to becoming a lifeline when her aging husband became seriously ill; Joe, for whom swimming is the exercise of choice because of a below-the-knee amputation; Trisha, the triathlete who seems to always be in training. As for me, while I swim laps and practice aqua jogging, I daydream about the things I’ll do when I can be a little less careful again.