10 Days Before Ironman, The ER Doc Says to Me

"Yes, Indeed, You Broke It" and a Partridge in a Pear Tree



Is it the universe's sense of humor, or simply mine?

After all of the kvetching and bitching and moaning and procrastinating and fussing and fretting and worrying about both the state of Lake Monona and my ability to swim in open water without giving myself respiratory distress, there comes this day of reckoning. D-Day. The day of deciding. Will she try Ironman Wisconsin? Will she put more than a toe in the water?

My coach sent me to Lake Monona to do a 10-minute swim. My swim teacher met me there with other ideas. I suited up and we went to the end of the pier. He jumped off. I decided to slide in, rather than jump in, and in turning to drop onto the end of the pier, slammed my foot into the metal post at the end of it. That hurt, but I got in and, after a little tenuous warming up, which was really cooling off, since I'd been baking in my wetsuit for 15 minutes, we started to swim. Mark would set a landmark goal for me, and each time, I would swim to it.
At some point he said, "Hey, your 10 minutes has passed." Indeed, more than 30 had.

I love Lake Monona. She was as I remembered her---green. Not creepy green, but zen mist green, alive green, cool green. Being in open water is like being in the womb of the planet, inside the Earth's core, inside the rhythm of the bigger tides that turn all of the water in all of us. I love that. I had a little discomfort here and there, but faced it down, with Mark's help. The swim out was in three or four segments; the swim back was continuous....we swam maybe a mile or a bit more, me taking it easy and Mark swimming with fins and paddles, occasionally swimming dolphin-ish, rising out of the water with a kind of ease and grace that is easy to read as joy when we see other mammals do it. I felt happy to be part of a school of swimmers, though it was just the two of us.

Mark says I am on line for a 1:30 Ironman swim. He says I can actually slow down, though I felt as though I were swimming excruciatingly slowly. How is it that everybody in the pool swims faster than me all the time, if I am able to swim a 1:30 comfortably? Can I believe him?

While we were swimming, I was thinking that it may simply be true that I am physically ready for this and not mentally yet prepared. How long might that take? 10 days? 10 minutes? another year? as long as it takes to get the thyroid dialed in?

So, when Mark and I stopped to chat in front of the windows in front of the Terrace, I said, "Dude, I think I broke that toe." When I got out of the water, I thought again "I think I broke that toe." I came home and in the shower, I tried to raise my right leg ---still sore from resistance running Tuesday---in order to clean the lake water out of the blisters left over from Saturday's marathon walk. So, I'm standing on my left leg, noticing it's hard to balance because of how much that little toe is complaining, and how absurd it is to try to be washing water from the swim out of blisters from the run while standing on a foot broken from clumsiness, and then I think, "Now, this is what I thought Ironman training was supposed to feel like. Finally."

So, after I throw gobs of antibiotic stuff on the blisters, gingerly put my shoes back on, go off to a haircut, and miss my core class, I decided maybe it would be good to know if the toe or more is, indeed, broken. I drive to urgent care, limp to the waiting room, and wonder why, on one of the most important nights in the history of the US, football is on the waiting room TVinstead of the Democratic Convention. But that's a different blog. Eventually the doc examines my foot, pronounces that I have hurt my toe, tells me that there's nothing to be done whether it's broken or not---I have told him my own diagnosis is "broken"--- but that how fast it will heal depends on whether it's broken or not. One scenario is 10 days; the other is four weeks. He asks me if I want an x-ray. Hey, I don't come to this spa for doctoring as good as I can give myself at home, so I say "x-ray." I limp down the hall, have them x-ray my foot, and wait. "Yep, you sure broke it," the good doc says.

"So," he asks, "were you planning on *winning* Ironman? 'Cause this could really get in the way of that. In fact," he says, "you aren't going to do too well. And it's really gonna hurt."

It could just be me, but do any of all y'all find it funny that on the way to facing down my Mononaphobia, on the way to discovering that all of that tethered swimming is transferable, on the way to having a swim that doesn't involve pulmonary edema, a nosebleed, or a vocal cord issue, on the way to discovering I could do a freaking IM swim in 1:30, I break my toe? Maybe I'm still giddy from not dying in the lake, but I've gotta think that whoever runs the show is laughing his/her/its ass off. And I am laughing right along.

And also getting a little p***ed. Which is probably a good thing.

I didn't run tonight, but I rowed instead. And now it's RICE and off to bed.