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.”
My frail-as-porcelain glutes — the cluster of tissue from hip to thigh tasked with keeping the body upright and on occasion propelling it forward — were causing a domino chain of damage, and had most likely been doing so for some time. To compensate for the glutes’ infirmity, my ankles, knees, hips and even my shoulders and arms had to thrash madly, taking on vast and uneven amounts of pressure, often far more than they were structurally fit to bear: This was probably what fractured my shin in the first place. And the ensuing weeks of limping and leaning on the other leg had just worsened the cascade.
The P.T. prescribed a studious regime of squats and thrusts and lunges to fortify myself. Grudgingly, I obliged, even as I found the diagnosis suspect: Surely if the defects to my behind were so grave, so fundamental, then they would have (pardon) reared themselves earlier in my three decades of living?
Physical therapy, for anyone who hasn’t had the pleasure, is a sort of fast-tracked ego death, a cold slap in the face to lots of things that you might have believed to be true about yourself. Only after I started remedying my “gluteal amnesia” (real medical term) did it become clear how little I knew about basic affairs like walking, standing and sitting (or living, for that matter). Within a week of the mandated twisting and shimmying and clam-shelling, my spine was noticeably straighter, smoother. Four weeks later and I could finally walk without pain again. It took three months more to fully rebalance my loopy musculature and break into a manageable jog — but when I did, I noticed a wondrous new power to each step and spring. My reawakened haunch muscles were doing their job.
The shock of discovery came twofold. Alongside my freshly activated glutes arrived cognizance of my own perilous hubris. My whole adult life, I had operated under a specific and tidy problem-solving logic: Whenever an issue arose, I would, on my own, lurch toward a straightforward quick fix, a plug-and-play solution, instead of making sure the fundamentals were in order. In retrospect, it was obviously nonsensical to have tried to transform into a distance runner overnight. Nor did the running — though as meditative and enjoyable as promised — really dissolve any of the gripes and anxieties I’d hoped to banish. In the end, all I managed to do was replace one set of problems with another.
Twice a week now at the P.T. clinic, I go duckwalking with a resistance band across my thighs and try to stand on an inflatable ball while balancing weights in my hands (picture a circus seal — yes). The first thing I do after getting up each morning is perform a “gluteus maximus burnout,” a nifty exercise wherein you stand rigid and tall, lift one leg out to the side as high as it will go and hold it there until you feel like you’re about to pass out and die.
You don’t die, of course. You carry on with your day, newly toughened, reinforced, awake to a part of yourself that you previously might never have noticed at all.
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