My dog and I almost died when he ran through an electrified barbed wire fence and chased steers and was going to get shot and I ran onto the field and got charged, head butted and thrown by an angry steer. Three times.
I do not need a lecture on the idiocy of letting my dog get into this predicament. He got away from me before I could leash him. I should probably be shot and might well have been. I might still be depending on how people respond to my most recent editorial regarding the NRA and their command that doctors "stay in their lane", albeit soaked with the blood and paralysis and brain injuries of their shot up patients. But I digress like a cow digests.
This story is not meant to be funny or cute. I could not talk well for a few days from all the screaming taxing my larynx. I still have whiplash, my ribs hurt, my sternum hurts, my vertebrae hurt, my femurs hurt. I could not do much but cry for the first 36 hours after this event. And me being who I am I was really worried about the steers. Except that one who was taking absolutely no shit from anyone. He will be fine.
And it completely threw me off my planned long run this week. It was all I could do to drag myself to the kleenex box to mop my tears. A twenty plus miler was not going to happen. Runners crack me up. It becomes all about getting the miles in, logging it on Strava and not getting too far off course. We do special incantations to avoid injury, and read essentially the same three articles over and over again in Runner's World (inspirational runner story, how to run your best 5K/10K/marathon, the best shoes of the year). The gravity of near death is only heavier by its impact on the marathon training cycle. Though it might be said that racing around a field, screaming, being attacked by an enormous, muscled, angry animal while people with guns are telling you what a fuck-up you are is one heck of a workout.
Running the last couple of days, finally able to move and breathe and not feeling quite as traumatized, I find myself wondering if I should bag this planned marathon, COWL it quits, STEER myself in a different direction, and/or just take some time to stop and smell the manure.
Marathons are the best, beastly and blessed. They involve just the right number of layers, so that you can start without freezing and shed later to avoid heat delirium. At the end they give you inadequately sized reflective blankets that in my opinion should be replaced by cozy, footed onesies, especially when you have to walk seventeen thousand more miles to get to your gear. Seriously, at the NYC marathon, the volunteers have to cheer people on to keep moving AFTER they finish the marathon for the long walk to the UPS van holding their stuff, which seems to be parked in New Jersey. Marathons teach you patience. How to manage pain. When to push, when to hold back. How to time bodily functions. And how to bore your friends and family to death, talking about marathons.
Once upon a time a friend and I were running in the Palo Alto Hills, back before the trails were paved and highly populated by physically active Stanford polyglots. Back on the west side we encountered a herd of cattle. Every single one of them ceased cud-chewing to fix us in their freaky stare and it stopped us in our tracks. At the time we joked nervously about the danger, but I now know we could well have been stampeded and back then we would not even have been able to post about it on Face Book! Morally I remain neutral on the right of cows to intimidate and attack when you cross on to their territory. Like mountain lions on trail runs or sharks after paddling to the outside, it is just part of the deal. It is not something to like or hate or spend too much time thinking about.
Taking away the hubris of marathon training and the image of guns, human rage and bovine wrecking balls, I am left with what is our common Achilles heel. That is to say, vulnerability. If this was film noir, it is a small child standing alone in an empty place with no clear ground or sky or boundaries or beginning or end. Probably somewhere in Sweden.
If this were a dating website, our bios would all read "attempts to deny being vulnerable".
If this were a poem it would read
I could be dead
Having watched my mother puke up chemotherapy all night then go to work the next morning
And my father get his entire heart replaced like it was some rusty car part
And my son dive into a destructive vat of drugs and violence
And my patients struggle with diagnoses while trying to maintain some semblance of dignity
I sometimes wonder what the point of life is.
When my daughter asked me that very question I answered the only true thing:
To be kind to others.
Running marathons is nice too, mainly because it teaches you stuff, like any hard thing does.
It will be awhile before I can look a cow in the face again though.
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