Marathon Running: The Unexpected Broken Bone Incident

Mile marker eleven, I thought. Fifteen more to go.

I’m running in the pack with some other military types. Some of us are wearing T-Shirts that proclaim U.S. Army. Others, U.S. Air Force. Others, Navy. We had one Marine that took pity on us and stayed with us rather than leaving us in the dust.

We were running a marathon.

None of us had any illusions of winning it. The thing about a marathon isn’t winning it. It’s finishing it.

I’m talking to a girl who’s an MP at West Point when I took a step. My footing seemed to give way and I almost went to one knee. Instead, I came back up and kept running.

“What happened?” she asked. “Did you trip?”

“I don’t know,” I said, blowing the event off. It was weird. It was like I’d stepped into a pothole that wasn’t there.

We all went on to finish the race.

I’d been going to MPI (Military Police Investigations) School at Ft. McClellan Alabama when this happened. When we got back to the barracks, I noticed my foot was a little sore. I didn’t think much of it and chalked it up to a little too much training.

“You’ve been running to much,” I told myself. My normal training run was well in excess of ten miles. “Take a couple of days off and you’ll be fine.”

And I was.

I went right back to doing miles of training everyday.

I finished the eight-week course, graduated, and flew back to Ft. Riley, Kansas where I was stationed.

As I got off the plane I noticed my foot was hurting a little.

“It’s the way I was sitting that caused that,” I said to myself. The little Twin Otters that serviced the Manhattan, Kansas airport didn’t provide for a lot of leg room.

By the time I got home (about a twenty minute drive) what was mild discomfort was now actual pain.

Worse, my shoe was getting tight.

I took it off. My foot was swollen and black and blue across the top.

“I’ve got a problem here,” I said.

I went to the ER at the base hospital. They got me in and x-rayed it.

“Guess what,” the medic said.

“What?”

“Your foot is broke.”

I thought they’d come back and say it was a sprain. But that wasn’t it.

“No kidding,” I replied.

“You know what else?”

“What?”

“It’s been broken for a long time. It’s partially healed.”

That meant I’d been running for some time on a broken foot.

“When did this happen,” he asked.

I remembered almost going to one knee on that marathon and I told him about it.

“And it didn’t bother you?”

I chuckled under my breath. “It was a little sore. But I’ve been doing ten plus miles a day. I thought it was just a little tendinitis.”

I spent the next couple of months in a cast.

I hated every minute of it.