When I was a child, my parents were based in Stuart, FL. There are photos of that time but I have no memory… to be honsest, my earliest memories are probably somewhere at pre-school at Paoli Methodist. The point is, I can only assume a lot has changed since my last visit to this town on the Treasure Coast; my memories of the place now are, well, painful.
There is little doubt that the Treasure Coast robbed me of my treasure… but more on that in a moment. Suffice to say that if Dead Men Tell No Tales, injured runners may have a story or two.
I was a little concerned by the temperatures at the start — it was 70 according to my dashboard and my weather app was claiming it was 69. But little did I realize just how strong a wind chill factor would play into this day. Gusts of 20 to 30 miles per hour, with a headwind in at least 75% of the course made for a tough, tough run even under the best of conditions… and I was most definitely not at my best.
Still recovering from the Snickers Marathon yesterday, I also am apparently channeling Weezer the Penguin from Toy Story 2. With the phlegm and lingering pseudo-bronchitis that I find myself battling, it’s an apt analogy.
Which may explain why my pace was slower than I’d have liked… albeit unbeknownst to me because the lead police car diverted the crowd down the wrong road we all were running *ahead* of time thanks to a 0.8 mile shortcut.
I realized it as we hit the 3 mile marker and my Garmin was showing me at 2.2. Fellow runners remarked upon the situation and a course marshal on a bike eventually rode past telling us we were too far into the course to make up for it. Bullshit, I didn’t sign up to run a 25.4 mile race. So during a straightaway section, I circled back and ran 0.4 miles to get a 0.8 mile correction. A number of spectators and more than a few runners told me I was going the wrong way but I was insistent that I was going to make things right… I noticed as I made my turnaround to rejoin the flow of runners that three others followed me back and high fived me. A shared camraderie and acknowledgment that we weren’t going to cheat the course or ourselves or our fellow runners by taking a Rosie Ruiz fast pass… no matter how inadvertent. I don’t know if others made up the distance later or if the race organizers opted to address the matter at race end. I did what I thought was right and stand behind my Garmin readings… especially since it was driving me nuts to hit a mile marker and not even be remotely close to beeping off the mileage on my watch.
So all seemed right then, at least for me… until the wind kept pummeling my face with the ferocity of biblical proportions. Somewhere on the first of four bridges, I reached a point where I wanted to quit. But somehow I kept moving forward, seemingly defying the laws of physics as I don’t know how I made any progress with that much headwind.
Somewhere in the early teens I stumbled over a misshapen sidewalk panel. But I was able to recover and I took a moment to count my lucky stars… isn’t that cute? I might as well have said aloud, “Well… thank goodness things can’t get any worse!” Because OF COURSE they can.
At mile 18, I tripped over a raised reflector in the roadway and went down. Hard. I had only just reached a recovery point on the last trip and fall I had and here I was once again plowing into concrete… and to make matters worse, I was holding my iPhone in my hand and smashed the bejeesus out of it. I have a tempered glass screen protector that’s supposedly able to stop a bullet from shattering the thing… I guess the asphalt was more powerful than a speeding bullet. On top of that, every fingertip on my right hand was deeply cut and bloodied. My left shoulder and knee were scraped to the hypdermis and blood spurted out like I was an extra in the Salad Days of Sam Peckinpa.
A police officer directing traffic saw me on my back and asked if I needed search and rescue. I knew where I was and what day it was; I could, regrettably, still name the President of the United States. And I had already wasted too much time bleeding; if I wanted to maintain anything approaching an ok finish time for me I could little afford to wait around for some “search and rescue” med team to ambulance by. So I waved her off and got up. I shook what blood I could off me, did a quick diagnostic check of my limbs, and decided, “Screw it. Eight miles injured? I can do that.”
Runners are idiots. We could have a femur bone sticking out of our bodies and we’d probably still say, “Meh, I think I can still finish….”
I would grab extra glasses of water at the aid stations and try and rinse out the wounds but they were too wide (and maybe too deep). I couldn’t staunch the bleeding… and my time slowed ever more.
Somewhere around Mile 24, a volunteer handing me a glass of water asked me what happened. “I fell six miles back,” I huffed and puffed, downing the glass and taking a moment to catch my breath… even if it was weezer-ish. “Is your leg okay?” she asked. “No. No, it’s really not,” I said, gathering my wits and muscles to make the final push. “We have a med tent right here if you–” I declined saying I’d made it this far, I would make it the final 2 miles.
But man did it suck. I walked a lot, struggling with the blood, the wheezing, the realization that my phone was shattered albeit still occasionally able to take photos… provided I didn’t need to push any button in the lower right hand corner.
In the end, I crossed the finish line, barely, and was offered medical assistance. The team there was great, rinsing out the wounds and slapping all manner of band-aids and bandages onto me (albeit without neosporin — they just cleaned it all with water… and the girl next to me who asked for tylenol or advil was told they didn’t have any… a weird choice on the supply order for the med tent if you ask me).
I snapped a photo and made the long drive home.
I felt pillaged and plundered by the Treasure Coast, battered and buffeted by the winds, bruised by the race itself. If X marks the spot, I’d need a lot of “X”s to mark the spots I ache.
***
Post Script: I googled Apple’s iPhone screen repair options. It was going to run me $129 plus tax and would take apparently 3-5 days.
I decided to try this place up the road from me. It fit the description of what I wanted to see happen nicely.
They did the repair for $129 plus tax… and they did it in 30 minutes.
So while a pricey solution, it could’ve been much worse… and could’ve taken A LOT longer.
I had sent a text to my brother telling him what had happened and summarized things as, “I’ll be ok… I can heal. The iPhone? Perhaps not so much.” Looks like I was wrong on both counts as I’m hurting big time at the moment. But on the “hey, things are looking up!” front — I found a penny (Lincoln’s head up!) as I got back into my car. So take that, Pirates of Stuart!