Things tend to go wrong. This is a series of blog posts about the things I think about during those moments when the wrong things happen.
Two years ago, I was pretty sure I’d just torn something in my knee. I’d gotten these new running shoes that were supposed to encourage me to run on the balls of my feet. They were supposed to change my running motion and turn me into some sort of super-runner. I was going to run like my name was Forrest Gump.
Except that I didn’t follow the instructions quite right. I was told to start slow. Run a half-mile at first. Then a mile. Then maybe 1.5, and keep at that pace for a few days. Add up the milage slowly.
But I got impatient. I only run two or three times a week, max, and it felt stupid to run for four minutes and then stop. And then come back the next day, run seven minutes, and stop.
So I did the mile run. Then the two. Then the next day, I ran like Jenny was yelling at me. Four, maybe five miles. I felt great.
The next day, I woke up, and I couldn’t move. I was a 22-year-old with a geriatric’s knees.
I went to yoga and talked to my teacher. She tried some stuff. I iced the knee. I heated the knee. I stretched the knee.
For four months.
It got a little better.
I’d long since put away the special shoes, so I’m not sure what made me do it. Maybe I was cocky. Maybe I was dumb.
But I decided to try out the shoes again. I liked them. Or, rather — I wanted to like them. I thought I was supposed to like them.
I went for a short run, maybe two miles. This was in June 2010. I felt alright.
I woke up in the morning, and my knee was worse than ever. And this time, no amount of ice, no amount of yoga could make it better.
I had to get it fixed immediately. I had just made a big decision: I was going to give this news syndicate, Stry, a chance. I was leaving for Biloxi, Miss., in two weeks. I was leaving my job, my paycheck — and my health care situation wasn’t exactly figured out.
I found the doctors in San Antonio who worked on the Spurs. If anybody could figure out my knees, it was going to be these guys.
They tested it out. The doc put some pressure on my knee. My eyes went screwy.
“Hurts, doesn’t it?” the doc said. “Probably a torn meniscus. Maybe an ACL. We’ll take an MRI.”
They did. I went home and tried to cry, but I was too busy worrying to even make that happen. I had torn up my knee, and I was moving away from my job, and a paycheck, and health care. I was going to Biloxi for three months, and I wasn’t sure I could walk.
The MRI took a few days to process. I worried constantly. What if it was a torn ACL? What if they had to operate? What if I had to walk around Biloxi on crutches? How the hell was I going to interview people on crutches?
I worried myself into that state where I could hardly move, save for going to work and ordering breakfast tacos through a drive-thru window. I waited for the call. I feared the call.
Then the call came, and it turned out I had massive swelling in the knee. No damage. No tear. Put it on ice, and it’ll be fine, son.
So, onto the happy thought for the moment: There’s this video I edited freshman year. It was the first weekend of the NCAA Tournament. My friend, Tyler, was shooting some video for a journalism class. He’d gone down to a local bar to get footage of fans watching the early games. The bar was full of Iowa fans, and that day, Iowa — the no. 3 seed — lost to Northwestern State on a buzzer beater.
And Tyler got the most amazing footage of a group of middle-aged white guys, their Hawkeye hearts absolutely breaking in real time.
I like to watch that clip, sometimes, and think about how easy it is to get caught up in the unimportant things. I think about how easy it is to take a tiny thing and magnify it beyond any sort of reasonable scale. I think about how I get mad over things I can’t control.
I did it with my knee, and I’ve done it since. But something about seeing what I actually look like in those lousy moments — and the guys in that YouTube video look exactly like I look when every fucking thing goes wrong — typically reminds me of how I need to get a grip and get over it.
Here’s to you, Hawkeye fans, for helping me get there.