Impossible
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One thing I love about running is being new enough to it to see the full spread between what used to be possible (which for me did not include running, let alone the long-distance kind) and what is possible now (which does).
Talking to people about running, you hear a lot of reasons it’s impossible for them—short legs, an old or new injury, etc. All of these reasons can be true and valid; some have a more intrinsic or persistent truth than others. For me, the impossibility of running appeared as a seven-inch scar along the outside of my left thigh—emblem of the first in a long string of major skeletal fractures and the surgeries to remediate them. None of these factors, strictly speaking, presented a hard barrier to running. But nearly all of them affected the pelvis or the joints centrally involved, and together they left me in a lot of pain. The rheumatologist who diagnosed the condition that had weakened my bones in the first place, whom I saw over several years in search of relief from that pain, told me to expect some level of mechanical complication forever.
Surgical repair of a broken femur was itself impossible for most of human history; even relatively recently they used to immobilize people who fractured their femurs, holding the bone in traction for weeks, and hope for the best. In those cases the best would generally not have included the option, on the cusp of age 40, of training for a marathon.
We live in an age of compounding conversions from the impossible to the not: Godlike powers of flight and communicating and annihilation that have existed for only a few generations are now being joined by godlike powers of near-omniscience and, perhaps before long, the artificial synthesis of consciousness. Yet numerous thresholds of impossibility remain: accounting for 95 percent of the content of the universe, for example, or ending war. Some people will tell you we’re going to figure these things out eventually. Some will tell you it’s impossible.
But what’s been interesting for me about running is that it’s become an embodied contradiction of what used to be one of my most unremarkable and immovable convictions. I remember leaving work in Times Square one night some years ago and thinking about what would happen if an emergency forced a quick evacuation on foot. I tried to run just to the next intersection, out of this motivated curiosity, and could not. This was a fact. But it was a fact that was susceptible, not to brute force, but to a gradual and assisted change in belief. And today’s truth is so laughably far from that one as almost to be its opposite. We live under the permanent reign of narrative; and yet in this kingdom we can enjoy some unadvertised freedoms.
Coming Friday: Bridges.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.