Given the fact that cycling has been a large – possibly the largest – part of this blog for such a long time, it makes me feel rather guilty to confess that for the past few years, and particularly during the hiatus that I took in order to concentrate on getting my career as a freelance translator off the ground, I have actually been obsessed with running instead (or jogging, as I used to call it and have since realised is not the ‘in’ word any more, similar to the fact that discos are no longer discos but clubs). Having said that, as I write this post, I have hardly run at all for the past eight months, so by way of explanation and if you’re sitting comfortably, allow me to take you back to the summer of last year…
Last August I was happily running through a park in Cheltenham at about six in the morning, revelling in the pleasantly warm weather and natural surroundings. With no particular route in mind, I chose to head away from the tarmacked path and into a wooded area. A gentle breeze was blowing through the trees and the light was still subdued from the early hour and the cloudy sky. I was thinking to myself how good it was to be in Blighty (the Muzuhashis were there on one of our bi-annual visits and had just spent a week or so in my old stomping ground, Devon and Somerset in the rural southwest) when, without warning and in a split-second, I tripped on a protruding tree root and fell flat on my face – as evidenced by a graze that I later discovered on my chest, pretty much my entire body from head to toe hit the ground in the same instant. If there had been anyone there to witness the event, I would have felt rather foolish, but there wasn’t, and despite the fall, I didn’t seem to be too badly hurt (if I had been wearing my glasses, I might have seen the tree root and avoided the fall in the first place, although that’s another matter). In fact, I stood up, brushed myself off, and kept on running, further round the park and eventually back to our AirB&B, where Mrs M and the kids were still fast asleep. Apart from the graze on my chest, there was another on my left knee, but it wasn’t bleeding, so I didn’t use a plaster and it had healed sufficiently by the end of the day that I also didn’t need one to protect it when I had a shower and went to bed.
I had vowed before the holiday began that I would, if at all possible, run every day for the whole month of our stay, and unless it happened to be raining, that’s pretty much what I carried on doing. While we were in London, however, I started to feel some pain in the left knee, and on the first of a few days in Cambridge, I only made it a few hundred metres down the road before having to turn back.
Partly as a last hurrah and partly because I wanted to tire myself out before boarding the plane back to Japan, I did manage a few kilometres near our Premier Inn in Twickenham, but there was clearly something wrong, a fact that was only confirmed on the two occasions that I went running in Japan in early September. For the first time in several years, I began cycling every day instead, but soon realised that even a supposedly non-impact sport wasn’t doing my knee any favours, and decided to get it checked out.
There is an orthopaedic clinic (小松整形外科, in case you’re interested) not far from where we live that is so renowned, its patients come from as far afield as Tokyo, which is a couple of hours away by train or car. I had been there once before when I pulled my hamstring a few years back, and knew to turn up early so as to avoid having to wait too long before being seen by one of the resident specialists. At about 6.45 a.m., there were already around ten people outside, making use of the tables and chairs that are left there to keep them comfortable as they queue. I chatted to a fellow who worked in a food processing factory and had injured himself lifting and carrying large, heavy trays of tofu (when he was younger, he said, he had worked at a car factory in Detroit on a kind of workplace exchange, and once witnessed a 7-Eleven being held up at gunpoint). The doors opened at 8 a.m., and having filled in a form to describe my symptoms, I then had to wait another hour before the examination rooms opened at 9. By about 9.45, I had undergone an inconclusive X-ray and booked an MRI scan for a couple of weeks later. Following the latter, which I didn’t have to queue for and took place in the late afternoon when the clinic was almost empty, I was diagnosed with something called a bone bruise, aka bone contusion (in Japanese honé–zashoh/骨挫傷), which is like a bruise beneath the skin except rather than bleeding, a kind of fluid is produced inside the bone – the white area on the left in the above MRI photo.
The doctor said that it should heal in about a month, provided I rested completely and did nothing that would put any kind of strain on it, including and among other things, squats, cycling, and of course running, so the following weeks were spent in an almost completely sedentary state – I even gave up using my standing desk, and the stretches that I use to combat typing-related RSI were performed sitting down. I borrowed a knee supporter from Mr Ireland which really seemed to help, and by late autumn, felt that I was at least ready to get back on the exercise bike in my rudimentary home gym. Almost as soon as I began cycling outdoors, however – over bumpy roads, uphill, and so on – the pain came back, so I reverted to my upper body-only routine. To relieve the boredom, maintain at least some semblance of fitness, and possibly help my RSI into the bargain, I also bought a set of dumbbells on Jimoty (a rather brilliant website for finding either free or mostly cheap secondhand stuff) and began using these while sitting down, too.
Thinking that I would be better in no time at all, I had signed up to take part in a half-marathon in early December – having achieved my ambition of running 10 km in under 50 minutes earlier in the year, I was confident of at least a sub-two-hour finish – but the day of the race came and went, and I had to make do with the entirely undeserved free t-shirt, which was delivered in the post along with a microchip and entry number for pinning to the shirt.
This process of thinking that the knee was better, beginning to exercise again, and having my hopes dashed by a fresh surge of pain has since been repeated several times, and a couple of months ago, I went back to the clinic, where a different doctor (whose surname, incidentally, was the rather romantic Hoshi – 星 – meaning ‘star’) assessed the situation and scheduled another MRI.
As you can see, the white area on the left had almost completely disappeared, which meant, so Doctor Star said, that I could go back to exercising as normal.
“But what about the pain?” I asked. “Why does it still hurt when I kneel down or lift something heavy?”
Doctor Star implied that I had nothing to worry about, so for the next few weeks, I took him at his word and eased back into training, to the point that on the 14th April, the day after my 54th birthday and about eight months after that fateful fall in the park, I ran a very slow and surprisingly tough two kilometres outdoors, on a route that I used to complete on my late-night walks and at a pace that was only marginally quicker.
Being careful to only run on alternate days and to use treadmill as well as tarmac, I built up to about 30 minutes on the former and 20 minutes on the latter. I also managed one of my usual cycling routes at my usual speed, and finally began to believe that the suffering was over. Then, perhaps inevitably, the pain came back again. When I ran outdoors, pretty much every part of my body had ached from the shock of doing so for the first time in more than six months, but not the offending knee. Now, though, the same pain had returned in the same place, and for the past few days, I’ve been praying that it’s just a minor setback and at the same time resigning myself to the fact that my running days may be over for good.
Late last year I asked for advice on a Facebook group for oldies such as myself (‘Running Over 50’), and one of the commenters talked of how she had instigated a very prudent and very patient routine after her own bone bruise: ‘…after 14 weeks I started running. 30 seconds x 5! Every second day to begin with. It took me almost 30 weeks to get to 1 hour running times.’ And this, of course, is what I need to do. For some unfathomable reason, even though my femur has healed, it also doesn’t want to be rushed, and will complain if I get ahead of myself or over-confident. I so want to be back out on the road and pounding out the kilometres, and I’m sure that I will again one day sometime soon, but the buildup will need to be very slow and very sure.
To use two clichés in a single sentence: Watch this space, but don’t hold your breath.
