'Can't'
This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Scars. The whole series is here. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.
It was a little over three years ago that I got out of a yoga class in Culver City, California, and decided to hop on the treadmill. I was on my first trip in the Covid era, having flown west two weeks exactly after my second Moderna shot. In a mild Peloton-deprived desperation, I ran for 30 minutes. This was an endeavor that for various reasons had no precedent in my adulthood. Being only somewhat of a maximalist, I waited almost a week and a half to sign up for the Malibu Triathlon.
I’d always resisted running because it was uncomfortable and it made me feel awkward. But I had also, for more than a decade starting in 2007, carried two different sets of metal hardware in my thigh bones. Whether because of individual tendency or differences in the fractures—both of which were in the trochanter, the jutting part of the bone toward the top of the femur—the doctor who repaired the left side opted for a footlong plate, screwed in at many sites along the side of the bone. Six months later, when I broke the same thing on the right side, another surgeon inserted a metal rod from the top of the bone. The right side always gave me less trouble; that incision was tiny compared to the one on the left, and the metal had no interaction with irritable soft tissue. The left side, by contrast, was a little beastly. In 2018, I went under the knife again to get the plate and screws removed.
Dating back to when I was breaking the bones, the effect of two traumatic injuries in such short order, and two surgeries, and two physical therapy regimens, was that I carried a lot of pain in this part of my body. Understandably, the messages I tended to hear from health care providers were things like, “Wow, it’s really crazy that a healthy twenty-something is breaking the two biggest bones in his body,” and, “You’re lucky this happened in modernity and you’re not disabled for life,” and, “People who’ve had surgeries like this always have a little trouble.”
That pain was underscored by a hazy sense of physiological flaw—or maybe something even more ominous. My otherwise anodyne primary care doctor went so far as to suggest, with almost mystical overtones, that I had control over my bones’ fragility. What else could explain it?
Years later, a more competent doctor (the one who just did surgery on my wrist, as it happens) took the radical step of putting the question to an expert. He referred me to a rheumatologist, who found that I had brittle bones because of an unmystical aberration in the amount of calcium my body excreted. I started taking a diuretic every day, and after a couple of years a DEXA scan showed that I was no longer on the cusp of osteoporosis.
In the meantime, there had been more fractures, including several of the pelvis. My takeaway, in the aggregate, was that I was lucky to have functioning legs at all, and that I should spend less time on a bicycle. When it came to my lower extremities, taking up running was not in the top quartile of things on my mind.
But it was somewhere lower down. Almost in the way you think about what it might be like to win the lottery or get picked for a moon expedition, I would sometimes think about marathons and triathlons. I could never have drawn the line from where I was to that finish last November in Central Park, but I entertained it as the lightest of fantasies.
What happened that day in Culver City a year into Covid was that I realized, more or less in a fell swoop, that my beliefs about pain had changed altogether (something I’ve written on extensively), but my practices hadn’t kept pace. When it came to chronic pain, I now suspected a psychic origin by default. That meant running was no longer off limits, battered skeleton or no. When I’d run the 30 minutes—marveling as each 10 of them went by without crippling ache—I expected to pay for it. And I was a little sore. But I was more curious about how this endorphin hit differed from what I was used to—this glowing antigravity—and about how much farther I might run next.
Since then I’ve run a few thousand miles. Sixteen of them were this past Sunday, my body still reeling from wrist surgery, my form distorted by the swollen forearm dangling in a cast at my side. I’ve found that I like to run now and then past places that carry some residue of pain from my past, emotional or physical, and offer my encouragement to the man who doesn’t yet know that he is as capable of this thing as so many others; that the last two characters of “can’t” are often a disguise—stoked by others, perhaps, but sustained by us. Nothing changes a life faster than figuring out that we can cut off the supply.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.