Saturday, January 14, 2006

Tripping Over A Cosmic Inquiry

Sometimes, it's better to just admit defeat. Especially when it's the universe who appears victorious over you, vanquishing your merely mortal form with a flick of a cosmic fingernail.

I was feeling really good training about a week ago. After sustaining various ailments and other unpleasant winter-type experiences (nearly frostbitten a couple of times, dodging SUVs when their drivers, pleasantly sedated by the heat of their vehicle's warm interior and the tryptophan from Thanksgiving leftovers caused them not to notice the jogger at the side of the road, albeit my bobbing headlamp and reflective running pants, pissy hip flexors, difficulty getting warmed up...followed by the greater difficulty of TAYING warm), I was havigna good, relatively solid week of getting back on the road. With Leadville 8 months away and counting at least half of January out due to prior commitments, I really needed to, well, get the lead out, to abuse a pun that's becoming too well-known to me lately.

Unfortunately after a decent warm=up walk/jog on Saturday I was justgetting into my planned 10-20, depending on how good I felt, when my lungs started feelign as though I'd either smoked about four packs of cigarettes immediately prior to heading out OR they'd been napalm'ed. They felt awful, burning wretchedly and aching something crazy. My favorite Frog was kind enough to bring back French goods he knew I'd like (especially since two of the three items he delivered were expressly requested) from Paris, but he was also kind enough to bring back bronchitis, I tihnk just to see if my winter-training immune system was up for it. Any victim of a long-distance relationship can attest to this: when your significant other has been gone for the better part of the past two months, you don't let a little think like bronchitis keep you from physically attaching yourself to them as much as possible when they are around, so of course, a week after he got home, once I figured I was either safely immune or contaminated and combating it beautifully, it hit me where it hurt...in my training. After sidelining me from that run and keeping a steady flow of coughing and wheezing the following day, I submitted to being ill, went to my doctor and received an antibiotic and a bottle of high-octance cough syrup. Yea me.

My cosmic joke wasn't over, though, it had really only just begun. The next day, Tuesday, I decided that, instead of wake up the very Sleeping Frog and get him to drive me to work, I would just haul his bike down from its hanging place in the storage closet in his garage and take it instead (yes, she the bronchially disturbed, brilliantly making this decision. The Universe was just shaking its head, marvelling at my stupidity even at my inclination to DO this). So I headed out, got into the storage shed, and after trying in vain several times to get it down, I examined the situation more closely. The bike hung by its front tire, which is, for those of you who've never been on a bike before (er...yeah, remaining politically correct here), the steering mechanism and therefore, the part of the bike that moves most. Consequently no matter how much I tried to pull it down by its frame I wasn't going to be successful; I had to find some way to maintain the wheel's position and get it over the hook. Now, mind you, it's 8am and I'm not a morning person, I've barely brushed my teeth and hair and I'm still wiping sleep from my eyes and looking forward to the bagel I'll be enjoying in a few minutes once I get the bike down and make my way over to the bagel shop near Gregory's place. I steadied the front wheel with my left hand, the frame with my right, and for one perfect moment got the bike up off the hook and started to bring it down from the sky of the storage compartment. Relishing my victory, I began daydreaming again about the bagel...and my moment was gone.

The Universe, I believe, reached out and tipped the wheel personally. I really do. Why else would the bike's wheel have turned? Well anyway, the front wheel went one way, the frame went another, and in the midst of trying to bring the thing down relatively quietly my shoulder twisted awkwardly. Pain bloomed up like blood in the ocean, like the color of the water after a shark-vs-surfer fight. I could taste it, like old pennies, as I brought the bike down and extracted my arm from its forward element. I am praying that the words that escaped my mouth at that moment weren't very loud, because I'm pretty sure my boyfriend will be evicted on grounds of his potty-mouthed significant other swearing in public view before dawn if anyone heard me.

It was all downhill from there. I still had to get to work and I had an adrenaline high from knowing that and injuring myself, so I locked the storage up, hastily got my bagel and rode to work...carrying a 40 to 50 lb backpack and leaning over the bike's handlebars because the seat was too high for me and wouldn't go down any further, so reaching the pedals required serious utilization of my injured shoulder. I didn't really known how bad it was until I got to work and a few hours later kept blinking at my screen because I was seeing stars. My boss insisted on taking me to the hospital, where I was informed that I probably tore my rotator cuff and God knows what else, was given a sling and a small prescription for painkillers and told to rest it as much as possible. Not easy when your primary form of transport is a bike, your job requires typing all day and you're an active poser---I mean, wannabe endurance athlete. Oy.

So the past few days have been interesting. I've become very good at riding my bike one-handed and holding my arm against me so as to minimize movement of the shoulder. My regular doctor gave me a bigger prescription for painkillers and told me that I hadn't torn it, probably, shot a load of cortisone into the joint to help it move a bit better and told me to rest it for at least a week because I'd at best sprained it badly and needed to, at the very least, take it easy. I wanted to tell him I'd trade him his car for my cruiser but this is a guy who's done the Vermont 100 and rides to work every day so he can jog on his lunch hour. This is what I get for trying to do something nice.

Somewhere, faintly, I can hear the universe laughing at me. It's a big ol' belly laugh too.