At face value running should be one of the safest sports. Safer than football, hockey, rock climbing, mountain biking, skiing or even competitive powerlifting. I hear pickleball is pretty safe. My dad routinely gloats about wiping the floor with some octogenarian at their bi-weekly pickleball club: both parties live and walk away friends. Pickleball, while cutthroat, is seemingly danger free like running. I’m not talking about the risk of overuse injury, or the occasional loss of a toenail. In that sense running falls down the list of benign sports due to a whole host of potential maladies: achilles strain, shin splints, planar fasciitis, a cadre of IT band issues (I ask you, how many sports have such a fixation with the IT band?), stress fractures, pulled glutes, quads, hamstrings etc and those are just injuries attributed to running shoes. The actual running part can hurt too.
Not to be outdone by other adventure sports, the sport of running went and raised the danger level by turning up the dial on how extreme one can run. No longer limited to the cinder track, the bike path or road, running expanded to trail runs, ultra distance marathons, sole survivor events, and extreme mountain running–glorified hiking while deprived of hiking gear. Things have gotten a little out of hand. And yet, ruling out being killed by mother nature or acts of god, which is an issue for both trail runners, golfers and rec-league softball players, the only real danger faced while running, particularly trail running, is falling.
I have fallen down trail running three times. I consider that a minor miracle given the volume of both miles and years of running behind me. As a 45 year old I can say that at this point I have my Malcolm Gladwell 10,000 hours of running under my belt. To have only fallen three times in all the miles and hours on foot isn’t bad. I feel good about my statistics. I’m sure I fell a lot as a kid. I don’t really remember. If the gracefulness of my nine year old is any indication of the quality of our shared genetics, then I probably fell a lot. But clearly I improved.
Invariably, at some point during long runs I tend to shuffle. Shuffling generally indicates bad form for a road runner and imminent doom for anyone attempting to dodge rocks and roots on varied and uneven terrain. While I have fallen 3 times, I have almost fallen hundreds of times. A careless toe will catch a root or rock and I’ll be snapped out of my semi-conscious running haze and instinctively go into cat mode to make sure I land on my feet and not my face. I am very concerned about landing on my face for some reason. I’m not a male model or hoping someone sees my lack of facial scarring and swipes on my picture on some dating app. I’m just not that in to the idea of facial trauma.
I worked with a woman who was a long time trail runner. We shared routes and lunchtime run options sprinkled throughout our daily work conversations. A year round, extremely dedicated, Boulder, Colorado runner, I regarded her as a complete badass. One day she came in to the office with the look of someone who’d lost a barroom brawl. We worked in Human Services so everyone’s initial conditioned response was concern for some kind of domestic abuse. The constant inquiry started to annoy her as she’d simply tripped and fallen while running down a steep rocky trail. She just happened to fall on her knees, elbows, hands and face. As much as one can put on long sleeves to cover scarred elbows or pants to cover scraped knees, facial trauma is not as easily concealed. In my opinion, the real pain of falling on my face would be having to repeatedly explain my clumsiness to concerned friends, family, co-workers, neighbors, waiters, baristas and grocery store clerks.
One time I feel simply because a narrow trail gave out underneath me and I rolled; not really my fault. The other two times I fell down in front of an audience. This would have been a real benefit if I was knocked unconscious or snapped a femur in half, but not so helpful when tripping like a klutz. In my head I went from looking like a paragon of fitness to a real doofus in an instant. In both of these cases I fell while preoccupied with other thoughts. The first was shortly into a run; like 1000 ft into the run. I came across a family walking up the trail towards me. I was probably trying to get into my best running form when I caught a rock and decked it. “Are you ok, that looks like it hurts,” the father asked as they approached my dust cloud of mortification. I had the tell tale skinned knee and cut palms to indicate I tried to catch myself and failed. “I think I just tripped,” I replied as if there was some confusion about how I got to be on the ground. They saw the whole thing so I couldn’t pawn it off on a bear attack or rabid marmot.
The other time vaguely resembled this prior incident. About 5 miles into an 8ish mile run I found myself basking in the perfection of a summer evening. Summer monsoon storms rolled into the valley bringing cloud cover and a cool breeze to soften the heat of the afternoon. At this point with all the difficult terrain and steep climbing behind I cruised a rolling stretch of trail back to the car, thoroughly enjoying moving through space. I came around a bend and snapped out of my fog when I saw a mountain biker ascending the trail towards me. As a rule I try to move over for mountain bikers. It looks like such a struggle any time they are not going downhill. And when they’re going downhill I hate to deprive them of their moment of joy after all that uphill suffering. I looked for an opening in the brush to move over and just as I took my eyes off the trail I caught a small rock and fell forward onto two larger rocks catching my right shoulder with one and my knee with the other.
While I had the same tinge of embarrassment as the first fall, this time I immediately knew the situation was worse. My mind quickly went into damage assessment mode. Legs bloody but functioning. Knee bruised but still bending. Hands sporting some deep cuts but no broken fingers. Shoulder making a disconcerting clicking sound but otherwise operational. The mountain biker approached with a shared level of concern.
“Hey man are you ok?”
“I brushed the dust from the cuts on my legs, watching blood trickle down my shin. I held my right arm at an awkward angle. “I think so.”
“I can hang for a bit while you get situated. Take your time.” It felt good to have his presence, his level of concern and consideration. I pondered my ability to go on but figured I wouldn’t know until I actually started to run.
“I think I’ll be ok, I’m not going too far,” which was a bit of a lie, but helped me reframe and get back into runner mode.
“Right on. You just never know when something like that is going to happen,” he offered.
“Yeah I seem to trip at the worst times.”
“It fucking sucks, I just got started today and clipped a pedal,” he confessed.
It was at that point that I looked up at the biker and truly took in his presence. I noticed that just below his bike shorts his leg was shredded and rapidly bruising. He also had a good sized scrape on his chin; the dreaded, inescapable facial trauma.
“I was just going along and clipped a fucking rock. Bam. On the ground.”
“Are you ok,” I asked, returning the courtesy of concern, not that I could do much to help with my lack of phone and clicking shoulder.
“Oh yeah, its all good. Shit happens.”
As I turned to start my hybrid run-limping down the trail, I pondered the irony of the situation. Shit does happen. I suppose you take that risk the further from the road or pickleball court you decide to venture. Shit happens to runners, and sometimes to mountain bikers. Well, it definitely happens to mountain bikers. Fucking catastrophes mountain bikers. So dangerous and prone to facial trauma, so much more so than us runners.
August 2023
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