Magnetic Resonance
by Monica Anderson
I run when it stops hurting, which sometimes lasts for an hour, or a day, or maybe an entire week. When I haven’t felt it in three days, I run twice—once when my roommates leave for class in the morning, and again while they all practice together. If it’s their workout day, I run the Red Barn Neighborhood loop because I know they’ll run the opposite direction, but if it’s weights day, I indulge: there’s the flat, repetitive loops at Dodson Farm, or the thrill of dodging golf balls out on the course, or, if I’m feeling too soft, I’ll run up, up, up Dimple Hill.
The pre-run routine is always the same: first, I strip naked so I can start fresh; then, I slide into blue or purple spandex, a sports bra just loose enough to ignore my fat bulges, and a baggy T-shirt from high school; next, I do my hip and glute routine—fire hydrants, single-leg bridges, clams, leg raises, and circles, so many circles, from every joint in both directions; and last come the shoes, one of three pairs I rotate through to keep the foam fresh and the cushions responsive. That’s when I head out the door, activate my GPS watch coordinates, and fly.
But these days it’s less like flying and more like dragging a roadkill carcass across the street, through the pasture behind your house, then realizing four miles later you went the wrong direction, turning around, and following your blood trail back to where you began. And you’re only holding the carcass with one hand because, somehow, your body can’t or won’t equalize your pain, so you’re stuck limping afterward. A lesser runner, or lesser person rather, would stop, would succumb to the pain like an abused partner after endless fights and bruises. But I won’t submit so I fight back again and again; even if I emerge battered and shattered, at least I’ll know I chose it.
The abuse isn’t just physical—they all tell me things, try to convince me that I’m wrong or weak or even deranged.
“You’re on lockdown,” the trainer says when I confess that it’s hurt for a month straight, more or less.
“You are incapable of listening to me,” Coach says an hour later.
“You need to stop running,” the entire team tells me. They all want to see me fail.
So I have to run in secret, which works except for the other day when a group drove back from Dodson Farm early and saw me on the bike path that parallels the main road. I ignored their screams to stop and zigzagged to escape, darting onto a side trail that none of them can see because they’re all so controlled by the routes and routines they know, so stuck in their comfort zones that they would never notice that the field with the horses that starts by the orange mailbox also has a one mile path that surrounds it. They told Coach, of course, so I told him I just needed a ten-minute study break to ease my stress, that it was my only run in weeks and really, school was so overwhelming right now with midterms and essays and group projects. He gave up when I started crying. Tears always work, until they don’t.
The first time I ran, I hated it. I wasn’t one of those runners who juggled a bunch of sports growing up and excelled at all of them, but then realized that the best part was all the running, up and down the field or the court or the bases. And I wasn’t the runner who only ever ran, ran, ran, all through elementary, middle, and high school, who learned early that I was born to do this. I was never athletic; I started running because I forced and squeezed myself into it like a secondhand pair of jeans that will always be too tight, but you buy them anyway because part of you believes you’ll slim down, that the best you is just waiting to be revealed. So you wear them all the time, stomach sucked tight, love handles swelling, and sometimes, for a few breaths, they fit perfectly and you’re convinced that it was meant to be all along.
For me, it began when my older brothers started winning state titles in football and basketball and baseball. Boy sports. My mother looked at me, her only daughter, a lowly, chubby seventh grader, and laughed whenever I picked up a ball. I could feel her disappointment, or maybe her total apathy, and it kept bubbling in me until I ran my first cross country race as a freshman in high school. I finished in the exact middle—52 out of 104—and it took me an hour to find my mother after the race because she had left to go retrieve my brother from his football practice, leaving me alone and shivering in my sweaty uniform.
“Sorry, Penelope,” she said on the drive home. “I guess running just isn’t your thing.” I couldn’t even look at her.
That’s when I decided that even if it ripped me apart, running would be my thing, the thing that brought me success and purpose and made my mother proud. So, I learned to love the pain of controlled, intentional suffering, the monotony of miles upon miles, and, many months later, the euphoria of winning a race, of being the absolute and irrefutably best runner in that particular moment. Nothing else mattered.
They keep pushing for an MRI but I resist it. What can magnetic resonance imaging tell me that I don’t already know? The doctor will squint and point to some shadow on the scan, mistaking a rogue dust speck for evidence, and say, This right here. This is it. I know because I’ve been through it before. Last spring, I had shin splints on one side and they immediately took control over my entire life. I acquiesced to an MRI that time because I didn’t know any better, and when I sat in Dr. Chive’s office two days later, I faced him, a mid-forties, talkative, genteel white man with a few gray hairs, and my trainer, a high-twenties, conventionally attractive, overworked and underqualified recent graduate, as they pointed to shadows on a screen that looked nothing like what they called it.
“As far as stress fractures go,” Dr. Chive said, “this one is veering toward the severe.” On the picture my bone looked intact and whole, nothing that could suggest a fracture besides some darker shading. “We’re looking at eight to twelve weeks of recovery.” I thought if I cried he would lessen my punishment, but right then I learned that the medical people don’t care if you disagree with them; they’re trained to forget and destroy all traces of empathy. Still, it works on coaches, especially coaches that aren’t used to girls—release the waterworks and they melt like candle wax. Then when you touch them they mold to your will. The only key is you have to be consistent, otherwise they’ll catch on and start building a wall between you until you’re both just shouting lies to each other over the top.
But that won’t happen this time. This time, I am in control of my life. I won’t let them force me into that ancient white machine that sounds like a battlefield and feels like bass turned up too high. I have my system, and it can’t keep hurting forever.
My mother will tell you I’m not just in college to run, but she’s wrong. I chose a bullshit major—communications—because I heard it was the easiest and that’s what all the future professional football players picked. If you want an example of athletes who know how to make their lives all about their sport, just look at the football players. They practice four hours a day, at sunrise and sunset, eat all their chef-prepared meals in a swanky, budget-busting football center, and the nutritionist spoon feeds them multivitamins so they swallow all those special supplements. If they maintain that gold standard 2.0 GPA, they don’t give a fuck about their academics, and neither do I. The only subject I need to study is my competition, the greats of my time and past times, girls who have already proven themselves, girls who I will one day beat. They’ll never see me coming, but I’m ready.
Here’s an example: Ella Bohr.
Ella is a redshirt junior at the University of Michigan. Last weekend, she won Griak, an infamous cross-country race in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, known to predict the season’s best, brightest, and toughest runners. The champions there often go on to a top five—if not first place—finish at our Big Dance, NCAA Nationals in Terre Haute, Indiana. That course is famous for freezing temperatures, fainting runners, and shattering dreams. Ella will be there next month. But for now, she’s training—all 105 pounds of her five-foot-six frame. Two years ago, she weighed 135, but then she started caring and counting calories like it was the only thing that could make her faster. A sacral stress fracture forced her to redshirt all three seasons last year. No one knew her name until she won her season opener, and then every race after that.
The first time around I did what they told me. I wore the suffocating boot, I did not run for six weeks, and I even stretched and flexed through all the strengthening exercises, religiously, twice a day. But their plan for my return to running was slow, methodical, too careful. It would start with a five-minute run on the underwater treadmill, and I wouldn’t get up to an hour run, outside, for three months. So, I got impatient and ran outside the third week. And my shin didn’t hurt, so I kept going and increasing mileage until I was back up to eighty the same week they would have had me at thirty. They couldn’t intervene in the summer because I was gone, and also because I lied about what I did. I said of course I’m still on the plan, of course I have complete trust in your advice, Coach, of course I know not to do too much too soon, of course. But I would return from summer training fit, strong, and fast, the best on the team, easily, and soon the best in the conference, the region, the country.
That’s why I ignore the pain now; I have too much to lose.
I stop eating when they all get together in a room—two doctors, two trainers, a nutritionist, and a psychologist—and sit me down, facing their authority-oozing panel, to tell me I have a problem.
“We’re concerned about your health,” the trainer says. I note the emptiness in her eyes. I’m sure she’d rather be home at seven p.m. on a Thursday, maybe curled up with her boyfriend watching a dance competition show or scarfing down takeout. I wish I could justify takeout, but I can almost feel the grease padding my hips.
“Your stress fracture risk is high,” Dr. Chive says. “You need an MRI.” I wait for him to continue, to babble on about why exactly I’m high risk and what’s happened in other, similar situations with past student-athletes, but for once, he’s succinct. My mind wanders to Gerard, that boy from last year who cared about his running and his body even more than I did. He wouldn’t even hang out with me during cross-country season because he found me too distracting and thought he deserved complete, uninhibited focus for the thing he loved. We didn’t start having sex until he told me he was transferring to another school, one with a better men’s program and easier academics, and when I saw his entire body for the first time, skin taut against bones and abs defined by default, I wanted mine to look the same. Now, I think about him when I need a distraction, when I want to remember again the time we didn’t have a condom but I couldn’t get pregnant because I’ve never had my period, a side effect of pursuing greatness.
“You’re amenorrheic,” the nutritionist says, as if it’s abnormal that a female distance runner wouldn’t get her period. “So you’re already fulfilling two sectors of the female athlete triad.” The female athlete triad, that ridiculous and simplistic formula medical people have wet dreams about. Here’s how it works: if you’ve had stress fractures, or a stress fracture, that’s one strike; if you haven’t had your period in six months, strike two; and if you have an eating disorder or disordered eating habits, boom, strike three, you’re out.
“We think you have a severe eating disorder,” the nutritionist says. I can feel the sadistic pleasure in the room; it’s like I’ve walked into an orgy that everyone but me knows about, their faces all twisting into grotesque, maniacal grins, open-mouthed and dripping.
So I decide to make their wish come true. I give them an eating disorder. But I’m not militant with eating like I am with running, so it ebbs and flows and I struggle to drop even a pound or two in a week. I meet with the nutritionist weekly, when I lie to her about all the things I ate, all the late-night ice cream snacks and afternoon chip cravings that never happened, and each time she smiles and says, “Anything else?” I fashion another craving in my mind and manifest it right there on the faux-wooden desk that separates us and asserts her power over me. Pretending to eat, it turns out, is almost as satisfying as the real thing.
I look at Ella and I see grace, grit, and the body I so desperately want. She, like Gerard, has all the skeleton-like qualities and rippling muscles we distance runners crave. Some jealous commenters online say she looks gross, unhealthy, fragile, but they must not understand the dedication and diligence it takes to have the privilege of anonymous people calling you scary.
Her teammates whisper about her; they say she hasn’t had her period in years, that her bone density must be low, that her mother, a nutritionist, makes sure she gets all the necessary nutrients without any unnecessary fuel, that sooner or later she’ll break into a million pieces in the middle of a race and vanish into the great abyss of distance runners who sacrificed everything to end up with nothing. I say fuck them. Because after all, Marie Curie poisoned herself again and again so she could discover something great. She carried the thing she loved the most, the thing that burned her from within, in her pockets, until one day she flamed into one last burst. If we love the thing that kills us, there is no escape.
The MRI says two stress fractures in two different places, one at the bottom of my tibia and one at the top, two holes begging for a string to connect and lift them higher and higher until someone else can heal them, someone with more time than me to waste, someone with smaller dreams. Because there are two of them, and because I gave myself an eating disorder, they say I’m on Red Alert. Like we’re at an airport and someone calls the front desk to say, “Excuse me, I saw some unattended baggage. It looks broken. Can we fix it?” I’m broken. They can’t fix me.
I draft a text to Gerard: What do you do when the one thing you love the thing that holds your entire life together falls apart and there’s no backup plan and everyone is against you. Do you give up and marry a businessman and work in a cubicle until you die or do you ignore them and ignore the pain and ignore the fact that probably all of this is your own fault and you can blame the system and the authorities and the sport but the only person who thinks it’s okay to run is me and I’m scared because I think I’m losing control of myself. I miss you?
My phone dies before I can press send and then I’m too busy sobbing in a ball on my crumpled bed sheets to care about him anymore.
I stop running for two weeks. My leg stops hurting two weeks after that. I run through it and I know that it was the worst back in August, back before anyone knew it hurt, and that now it must be fusing back together and healing. Phantom pains don’t count because they’re just there to scare me, to make me forget what I’m here to do.
My mom called me at the end of the first week.
“Penelope,” she said. “I want to talk about next summer. I think you should get a job.” I told her I have a plan, that I’m going to live and train in Arizona, and work at the running camp. It’s only two weeks, but at least I’ll pocket a few hundred dollars.
“Oh yeah,” she said. “How’s the running thing going?”
Terrible, I wanted to say. Shitty. Tragic. I’m stuck and I don’t know how to get out.
Instead I said, “It’s okay. My lower leg kind of hurts but it’s nothing serious.”
“Well, I’m sure it’s fine,” she sighed. “You’re always so dramatic about these things.”
Then the doctor orders a bone density scan. The results go like this: “The baseline is zero. Above average, what we expect to see in distance runners—from all the pounding and high-impact training, you know—is slightly above average, ideally 1.1 to 1.9. Then there’s the flip side. The below average, which is still considered average up until about negative 0.8, but after that it’s considered low density, and that’s what we don’t want. We measured two areas—your lower back and your hips. You’ll see here that your back is around negative 1.4 and your hips are negative 1.9. Do you see what I’m saying here? This is bad. This is very bad.” Okay, but what’s your point? “We can’t let you run with density like this. Very, very bad. This can take months, years to correct.” But when can I compete again? “I wouldn’t clear you for competition until—at the very, very earliest—the next, next track season. A year and a half, minimum.” Minimum? “And you can’t be running, either. Impact will make it worse. We’ll have you in the pool for, say, six months. Then we’ll reevaluate. Maybe we’ll get you on the Alter-G once or twice a week, fifty percent body weight, max.” Why can’t I run? “It will take a long time, but I’m confident that we can still correct this.” I just want to run. “Low bone density is very, very bad, but we still have time to fix it. You don’t want osteoporosis when you’re older, do you?” Let me run.
Maybe I peaked in high school. My senior year, I won the district cross-country race, and then I was a favorite for the podium at state. My one chance at a state title. I spent the weeks before visualizing the course, visualizing the mental race by repeating the mantra fierce, fast, fighter, and the physical race by watching myself soar to a win—maybe even a course record—down that bright blue track in the last three hundred meters.
The actual race was harder. I stayed in the lead pack triad for the first four thousand meters, and then up that last grueling hill the other two surged. I willed my legs to keep grinding—fierce, fast, fighter—but inches turned to meters, and when the track came into view, Brooke Coursey, a freshman phenom, was already on it. My entire body flamed but I still had time to catch the other girl, some dark horse from an irrelevant school, so I dug deeper than I ever had and pushed, each step excruciating, until at last, in the final fifty meters, I spilled past her and collapsed over the line. Second place.
Standing on the podium, one step lower than Brooke, I felt devastated and ashamed. Nobody expected me to win, not even my coach, but I did, I knew I could have and should have. And as they draped the silver medal around my neck and the crowd cheered, I smiled through blazing tears and promised myself: never again.
I want to ask that girl: what happened?
Here’s the example I’m afraid I’ll become: Penelope Laing.
Penelope is a junior at a state school in Washington. It doesn’t matter which one. Last weekend, she borrowed her roommate’s car, a 2003 Subaru Outback, drove to a trail in Portland, and ran for twelve miles. People who run this trail go on to enter local road races, sometimes cracking the top ten of their age groups at something like the Tacoma Half-Marathon. Maybe she’ll get there in a couple months, but for now she thrashes all 121 pounds of her five-foot-three frame across the dirt and pretends she’s somewhere else. Six years ago, she wanted to weigh 110 and decided her entire life was about running. She forgets the pain in her leg and keeps running until her mind comes close to breaking. Nobody comments on her online because nothing about her is exceptional; she’s one of thousands of high-school standouts who believed they had what it took to make it, to have their names worshipped by the next generation of runners and their pictures plastered in running stores. Her teammates whisper that she shouldn’t be running, that there’s something off in her brain, that they used to really like her but now they can’t believe anything she says and besides she’ll probably leave soon anyway, there’s no way out of this mess she’s made.
Who remembers anyone but the runners who win titles? What legacy do all the failed scientists leave, all the women who tried to be like Marie Curie but couldn’t separate radium and polonium from all the pollutants and particles and distractions and setbacks that got in the way? Why is failure the only alternative to greatness?
Today I run to Dimple Hill—up, up, up—while the rest of them do mile repeats back at Dodson. It’s one of those late-fall days when the sun decides to peek out one last time and the trees all shrug off their leaves at once. The ground explodes with color but you look up and see death everywhere, cleaved by glittering sunlight. I pass all the science buildings on campus—chemistry, biology, physics, earth sciences—and then onto the bike path and the cows with the holes in their sides so the veterinary students can learn the digestive system, and then under the bridge where I used to come to kiss Gerard, and then beside the pastures that never end, and the one with what looks like a metal rocket ship hidden behind bushes, and then the trail twists and turns and I smile at all the middle-aged people out walking to grasp onto the little youth they have left, and finally I’m climbing. My quads start burning but it creeps up slowly, like boiling a lobster alive degree by degree. My lungs feel tight, searching for air, and I know when I start wheezing I’m almost there. Arms pumping, heels striking first, then toes, ponytail swishing side to side, sweat pooling beneath my arms and the elastic on my bra, GPS watch beeping as I tick off another mile, eyes squinting in concentration and pain—this is how I emerge. And when I get to the top and see the view, all the houses and fields and mountains for miles and miles, everything illuminated by the sun overhead but still so dark, I don’t slow down, and I start on the trail down the hill, bracing for the pain that echoes.
Monica Anderson (she/her/hers) is a writer, educator, runner, and animal lover. She once lived in a small village in Togo as a Peace Corps volunteer, but after a lot of traveling and wandering, she has settled for the moment in Corvallis, Oregon, with her partner, their cat, and a growing collection of plants and fish. Monica can be found on Instagram @magicallmonica.
Photo: The Spine 1 by Emanuela Iorga