I wonder if I've always approached pain differently.
Believe it or don't, like Al Bundy, I played high school football during my freshman and sophomore years. Being the opposite of nimble, I was placed on the offensive and defensive lines, which was a shame because I was also the opposite of big and strong.
The event that I recall took place during my sophomore year, the year I realized that everyone else was still growing while I had stopped. I was (and am) all of 5'6" and 150 pounds, playing center on the defensive line (notice the problem here?) during a practice scrimmage. The ball snapped, my reflexes are pretty swift so I went forward into the grunting, thudding mass of the line, when I felt a body at my knees and another hitting me across the torso making me fall leftward with my arm outstretched. I felt my hand hit someone's smooth, plastic helmet followed by a sudden numbness. The play ended, I sat up, held my left hand in front of me, noticed something amiss, and said, "coach, I think I dislocated my finger"; my little finger was pointing off in a funny direction, and I didn't feel any pain, just a bit of surprise at this new angle that my finger had taken.
The coach sprinted over, maroon cap over his graying hair, dark sunglasses, gray cotton shirt tucked into his too-short maroon shorts in a way that accented his old man's belly and saggy groin (the problem with being a writer: you see too much), skinny old man's extremities all akimbo except for the arm under which he'd tucked his clipboard. He paused for a split second, apprising himself of the situation, then without further question or hesitation grasped my hand and popped the joint back in place. I'd been, if not exactly numb, since I'd known something was wrong, in something like discomfort, but then noted, also with surprise, "huh, it's starting to hurt now." My father took me to the local hospital where x-rays were taken, a splint applied, and ever since then I've had a little more curvature to that particular joint, an extra little bend, and this experience with pain.
Or going back even further into the past: I remember visiting the dentist as a child. Now, I never had the same apprehension on these visits as many of my friends had, which is perhaps the sign of a faulty long-term memory that would otherwise have associated "trip to the dentist" with "drill to the face", or perhaps I just had a different experience with pain.
The dentist's office was nothing particularly special, not geared towards children, no murals of firetrucks and giraffes. The dentist herself was a well-put-together Korean lady, not the kind who would fawn over children. I remember sitting in the chair, staring up into exam light, hearing the drill whine; every so often, if I let out a little whimper or if a tear would well up in one eye, the dentist would say, "tut-tut," and the gasp would stop or the tear would magically roll back. I would, every now and again, feel myself tense up as something was being scraped or drilled or dynamited, notice that I was tensing up, and then making myself relax and open my mouth wider, unlike my siblings, who had to have bite-blocks placed in order for the dentist to work. Years later, as an adult, I would go back to this same dentist since I hadn't known who else to go to, and thinking with mild surprise that she hadn't seemed to have aged. At all. And wondering if her command over my pain had involved some sort of faustian deal that would also keep her eternally youthful, actually, her and her entire office staff as many of the same Latina women who worked in her office not only remembered me as an 8 year-old but also looked no different decades later.
It's not that I could say something as brash and dramatic as, "I don't feel pain," because that would be patently untrue, I definitely experience pain, and it's not that I have some sort of weird fetishistic relationship to it, because I don't like pain, and like most rational people, given the choice, would prefer not to suffer it, and I don't have that weird nonsense bravado to proclaim "all pain is an illusion!" since, frankly, when you feel pain, it definitely feels material, boy and how.
But I wonder if my pain experience somehow suits me for endurance running? Now, there have been times when I've been slowed down or had to stop running due to a negative somatosensory something, weakness, owie, etc., no doubt, but maybe the way I feel and cope with pain has/will let me run real, real far?
Thing is, I don't think it's something unique, necessarily rare or something inaccessible by humanity at large. Take, for example, an article in this month's "Runner's World" which details and semi-laments the fact that many more runners now qualify for the Boston Marathon, an event that was in some ways casually considered premiere but has now been elevated to the near-Olympic (in the classical Greek deistic sense, not the modern IOC-bribery sense). Not that it wasn't an elite race before, but in the past it didn't have the same totemic value placed on it by the teeming mass of marathoners who are looking for a life-defining event, a running-reason for being, but the point being that that's a lot of folks who experience pain in a way that doesn't stop them in their tracks (so to speak).
So now the question becomes, how much further (and farther) can I push this special relationship with pain - 50K? 60K? 50 miles? 100K? 100 miles? Somehow, it's weirdly comforting to think that if this ability is innate to all people then it must be within me and therefore accessible, and all that needs doing is the going out and exercising of this trait, to run and run and run.
Or maybe I can just go run another marathon - Long Beach, anyone?
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