Of Marathons and Sprained Ankles

(originally published April 19, 2015. My original blog, on Wordpress, was hacked in early 2016. All of the original posts, through January 2016, have been re-posted here on Blogger.)


Just two weeks to the Geneva Marathon. It may sound strange – particularly if you're not a runner – but I’m looking forward to it. If nothing else, it should be a bit less grueling than the Jerusalem Marathon I ran last month.

Jerusalem is one of the hillier and more challenging marathons in the world. Just when you can't bear the thought of facing another steep incline, you turn the corner to be greeted by yet another steep incline.  Geneva, in contrast, is mostly flat. In Geneva, you view the mountains from a distance. In Jerusalem, you run on them.

Geneva also should be easier simply because running a marathon tends to go more smoothly when you're not nursing a sprained ankle. A month before Jerusalem, I was out for what should have been an easy training run when I managed to step in the exact spot where the sidewalk ended and the street began a few inches below. My ankle buckled, and in an instant, I was no longer upright, instead sprawled rather unglamorously on the sidewalk. When I became vertical again and tried to resume my run, I quickly discovered that I could no longer run. I could only limp. I tried to stay calm as "I'm never going to be able to run the Jerusalem Marathon now" flashed across my mind.

Worse still, I was 3.5 miles away from my car and didn’t even have money with me for a bus. So I spent the next hour hobbling back, becoming ever-more painfully aware of how out of reach the marathon had become.

Packet Pickup for the Jerusalem Marathon

When I finally arrived home, I Googled how to heal a sprained ankle as quickly as possible. The various predictions of required healing time ranged from encouraging to daunting. I followed all of the advice. Still, after a few days of icing, elevating and wrapping the ankle, I didn’t look like I was in any shape to run around the block, much less a marathon.

And yet - I had deliberately intended to celebrate my turning 50 by doing something that I would have considered impossible when I was 30. I had already told several friends and relatives about my ambitious goal of running five marathons in my 50th year and using the marathons to raise funds for the Israel Sport Center for the Disabled. The last thing I wanted to do was to tell them: Never mind. I'll get back to you about this sometime when I'm feeling better - hopefully before I'm 51.

The wheels started turning, grasping for a solution. If my ultimate goal is to transcend what I had previously believed to be my limits, and inspire others to think about transcending theirs, then could I use this new obstacle to achieve this ultimate goal, and somehow find a way to run the marathon even in the face of a sprained ankle?

While I didn’t want to do something stupid that would cause further injury, neither did I want to give up at the first bump in the road (literally!).

So again I turned to Google to see if anyone else had run a marathon with a sprained ankle. First, I came to the site of the “Twisted Ankle Marathon,” the actual name of a marathon run on a rugged dirt trail in a state park in Georgia. In my condition, I somehow wasn't inspired to consider running something called "Twisted Ankle" as one of my five marathons.

Further down the list of search results, I discovered that a sprained ankle isn't affected too much by the motions the foot makes while running. I came across chat lists where people told of successfully negotiating a marathon despite spraining their ankle weeks before. One person actually inquired about running a marathon a mere ten days after his injury when his ankle still looked like a balloon with five days to go until his marathon.

In my book, that would be entering the territory called “doing something stupid.”  But maybe, with a month on my side, I could find a way. My first step was to delay starting this blog. I had planned to launch my first post a few weeks before the Jerusalem Marathon. But I had no interest in writing another post a few weeks later about how I didn’t actually run Jerusalem because my ankle didn’t heal in time. Every so often, procrastination is the wisest course.

In the days leading up to Jerusalem, several people asked me what my goal was. By that, they meant within what time frame did I want to complete the marathon. “My goal,” I told them, pointing to my ankle, “is to cross the finish line.”

By marathon day, although my ankle wasn't fully healed, it seemed in good enough shape to make the attempt. Except that I had missed so much training over the past month that my muscles were no longer in ideal marathon condition. I had managed to get through a 16 mile run a week or so before - which is a nice distance, but still 10 miles short of a marathon.

I settled on a strategy of running the 16 miles that I knew I could run, and then taking everything after that one step at a time to see how far I could go. As the miles racked up, various muscles started complaining. But my ankle felt fine. More muscles joined the conversation. Some went from complaining to screaming. As I approached the 22-mile mark, pretty much every muscle in my lower body was in revolt. Still, my ankle felt fine. By around mile 24, with just over 2 miles to the finish line, I really was taking it just one agonizing step at a time. And then I felt it. My ankle started to hurt. I began to worry that after coming this far, my ankle would derail me after all.

Then I realized that it was my left ankle that hurt. My right ankle – the one I had sprained – still felt fine. And it did all the way to the finish line.

Go figure.

Sometimes, obstacles can be warning signs. But more often, we mistakenly let obstacles stop us when we should be seeing them simply as disguised opportunities to accomplish what we didn't think we could.

And with that, I'm off to do another training run for Geneva. And believe me, this time, I'm going to watch the bumps in the sidewalk very carefully.

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I am running these five marathons for the amazing children and adults at the Israel Sport Center for the Disabled. We have set a goal of $5,000. Every donation of any amount makes a difference. Click here if you want to help us get to the finish line!