I didn’t appreciate their utility — and paid for it.
Two years is roughly how long it takes to achieve moderate fluency in a foreign language, to acquire an associate degree or to gestate an African elephant. This also happens to be the length of time that I recently spent pretending I could walk.
My problems began during the winter of 2023, when dingy weather and a depressive fit spurred me to sign up for a half-marathon. An athlete I was not — before this point, my sporting abilities could have most kindly been described as “unrealized” or “aspirational” — but so many friends, writers and LinkedIn influencers had been proselytizing running as a one-size-fits-all spiritual reprieve. Like a chess pawn or kangaroo, I biologically lack the capacity to backpedal, so once I decided to Become a Runner, I immediately binge-purchased gear in the requisite neons and crashed through a training program. On race day, mulish overconfidence fueled me through all 13 icy miles. Triumph! Exercise-endorphin nirvana!
Only when the adrenaline wore off did I realize I’d broken my shin bone.
“You didn’t notice?” asked the orthopedist, who, tapping a little hammer against my tibia the next day, narrowly avoided being clubbed by my knee-jerk spasm of pain. I’d only felt twinges of discomfort, I explained. “But why did you keep going after it started to hurt?” my partner inquired, as he helped me hobble from bed to fridge for weeks afterward. (It was a rhetorical question. Living with me afforded him a front-row seat to my stubbornness.) The orthopedist recommended bed rest, which I largely ignored.
I assumed the fracture would heal; that’s what bones did. And so it did. But then one day, months later, I sprinted for the bus, and the ankle of my perfectly healthy other leg rolled neatly inward, collapsing. Next came 18 months of odd sprains, Whac-a-Mole tendinitis, a recurring Pangea of bruises.
So finally: the swallowing of pride, an appointment with a physical therapist. With saintly patience, my P.T. informed me that my shin bone was in great shape. Probably stronger, even, than before the break. But I was still suffering from haywire misalignment across my entire skeletal structure.
At the root of all this, declared the P.T., was my “weak posterior chain.” Which, it turns out, was a polite way of saying, “Your lack of butt muscles is ruining your life.”