The Anatomy of Injury Denial, Part IV

This is the fourth article in a series describing my first ever running injury in 20 years, how I’ve dealt with it heretofore, and my path to recovery.

In my last injury post I detailed what happened to my knee, why it happened, and my physical therapist’s prescription for recovery.  Now I’ll share the beginning of my meandering (and still not fully traveled) road to recovery.

As I mentioned in my previous post, following through on the prescription of therapeutic exercises wasn’t as easy as listening to it, and then telling my PT Nicole that I would do what she was telling me I should do.  Prior to my injury I would run 30 miles in a heartbeat but you would have had to beat me just to get me to do 30 pushups.  If physical activity didn’t involve running, or any of a number of team sports like baseball or basketball, I wasn’t interested.

So the directive to perform a number of exercises each night involving odd body movements targeting muscles in areas I never knew I had them was not necessarily met with loads of enthusiasm on my part.  My first few visits to see Nicole I would dutifully report that I had performed all of my exercises in the intervening days when that was really only a half-truth, if not a quarter-truth.  The truth was that I hated doing anything that didn’t involve running.  And I’m sure Nicole knew.  But like she always tells me, “this is why I learned just as much about psychology in PT school as I did about physiology!”

Nevertheless, my initial diagnosis was a moderate tear of my MCL, something from which it should only have taken me about four weeks to recover (with “should” being the operative word here).  The fact was, however, that I had a work trip to Europe planned to London, Paris, Frankfurt, Cologne, and Munich at the end of April and on the weekend I was going to be in Frankfurt I was planning to run the Marktplatzlauf (rough translation: Marketplace Run) 10K in Groβostheim, a little town not far from my company’s offices outside Frankfurt.  And no little MCL tear was going to keep me from running my first road race in Europe.

My friend Brandon had just moved to Frankfurt to spend in a year in our office there and along with one of our German coworkers we jumped on the Autobahn and headed out to Groβostheim for the race.  The town was quaint, everything you might expect from a western European countryside town, with its church steeple anchoring the central town square, and cobblestone streets that seemed to meander in every direction with no particular rhyme or reason.  It was a unique feeling: the juxtaposition of this historic town, a scene with which I was not at all familiar, and that of a typical road race, something that’s as familiar to me as apple pie.

I studied German for a year in high school and two years in college and like to think I can speak it with some level of conversational competency.  (For some reason, my German always seems to improve with a drink or two).  And after spending four days in France, an incredibly beautiful country but one whose language I am terrible at even attempting to speak, I was excited to have the chance to flex my German pipes (yeah, E-Trade commercial) in the land of native Deutsch speakers.

It was a little bit more difficult than I imagined, as native speakers naturally speak very quickly.  And with my limited vocabulary, I found myself ensuring I only spoke to people in German when I knew their answer would consist of words I would understand, such as “Where is X?” or “What time is it?” or “How much is that?” (I know, I must have been a thrilling conversationalist).  I didn’t know too many German words related to running other than laufen (to run), schneller (faster), langsamer (slower), or die Schuhe (shoes), so I pretty much kept to myself on the starting line.

The gun went off and my knee felt great.  As we turned one sharp corner after another I kept avoiding the cobblestones as much as possible to prevent any cobblestone-induced injuries.  Aerobically, it had only been about three weeks since I had last been regularly running so I was able to stay near the front of the pack for awhile.  I followed the leaders through the town scenes of what I imagined could have been a World War II-themed video game (except without all the blood and destruction).

The course consisted of four 2.5K laps around the same loop, with each lap crossing through the Marktplatz twice.  After lap one I was beginning to notice a slight tingling in my knee.  After two laps I knew I had issues.  I was planning to peel off the course and finish with the 5K runners, who of course only needed to do two laps, not four.  No sooner was I veering toward the finish chute, however, when a nice little German lady noticed that my racing bib was color-coded for the 10K race and shooed me back down the street.  And, in my state of concern for my knee, I couldn’t at that moment quite come up with the words “My knee hurts, I have to stop.”

So I did one more half lap, where I conveniently blended off the side of the course into the middle of the crowd in the Marktplatz.  My knee was not happy with me.

Damn.

I was a little bit worried.  I arrived back at Brandon’s place in Frankfurt that evening and promptly iced my knee (icing: another activity I was never very fond of until this injury).  We then went out that evening to the Nacht der Museen (Night of the Museums), where all of the many museums (film and TV, natural history, aerospace, and so on) along the Main River in Frankfurt are open during the nighttime and have bands and open bars.  I definitely recommend it if you’re in Frankfurt at the end of April.

I woke up the next morning, and my knee, surprisingly, felt okay.  But I made no plans to run on it, and would not do so again for, oh, another two weeks or so…

Tagged as: 10K. Marktplatzlauf, Germany, running injury