The Bigger They Are, the Harder They Fall

My assailant

If this is true, I'm colossal. Two Sundays ago, I was 3 miles into a very pleasant 12-mile run with Manu when, for reasons still unclear to me, I went flying, Superman-style, and landed on a metal subway grate. Although my  shoulder, hip, hands, and elbow took a beating, my left knee was the first to make impact and therefore got the worst of the fall. By the time I had hobbled over to some nearby steps and worked up the guts to roll back the my tights to actually look at it, it was already puffing up, and the parts that weren't bloody were taking on a striking shade of indigo.

After I got my breath back, I was annoyed, and insisted that I could probably keep going. "Oh yeah?" asked Manu, who was doing a masterful job of keeping a straight face as sympathy and amusement battled behind his calm exterior. "Run to that wall." Huffily, I stood up and took off running. This lasted for exactly two steps, when, to the enjoyment of a nearby group of tourists, I set my left foot down and nearly fell again.

I insisted that Manu go on without me - no point in ruining the run for both of us - so he escorted me to street in a manner that put me in mind of a retirement home nurse. He flagged down a cab for me, threw me a twenty-dollar bill, and continued on his way. (Had I been alone, I'd have been in quite a pickle, as I never carry cash or even a Metro card with me when I run.) I limped from the cab to his nearby apartment, where his roommate's brother, a 4th-year medical student bound for the ER, very professionally wrapped a few ice packs in paper towels and applied them to my various injuries, all the while not breathing a word about what a klutz I was. Manu's roommate kindly asked me if I needed one more ice pack for my bruised ego.

Kneecaps #1 and #2

While the incident was, obviously, annoying, particularly when you consider that there are four flights of stairs between my apartment and the rest of the city, I mostly found it amusing. It's slightly less so now, with four days between me and the National Marathon and what looks like a second knee cap stubbornly refusing to go disappear. My dad told me in an over-the-phone diagnosis that there really wasn't much I could do but wait for it to go away. (Bad.) However, he also said that, from my description, there wasn't really much I could do to cause further serious damage to it either. (Good. Sort of). I ran three tentative miles on it yesterday, and while it was achy throughout and is, perhaps, marginally more sore today than it was yesterday, it was definitely tolerable. So I plan to line up in the corral for the National Marathon on Saturday and see what happens. Donations of pre-race morphine will be accepted with gratitude.