It was my senior year in high school and the first cross-country race of the season, and I was in the lead. This was an uncomfortable position for me to be in as a track athlete who specialized in sprints. Yet there I was, comfortably running in that uncomfortable position. I remember making the final turn to the finish, and gently sailing through the finish line unopposed.
It is at this point in my story where one would assume that I took that win and ran with it to have a successful cross-country season. But there would be no such happy ending.
After that race, I began to feel a twinge in my foot that would ache each time I ran. Several doctor appointments later, there were no answers, and while I continued to run, I barely hung on to a varsity spot on the team the rest of the season.
The interesting part about this story is that as I began to move my way toward the middle of the pack (a more comfortable spot for me), the pain in my foot began to dissipate until it eventually disappeared altogether.
And while at the time, I had a pretty good idea of what was causing my foot pain (that was very real, by the way), it wasn’t something that I was going to admit to myself, let alone my parents or coaches. What I was dealing with was pressure that I didn’t know how to handle. It was much easier for me to tell people that my foot was hurt, than it was to say that I couldn't handle the pressure to be the best. It was easier to go to the doctor and have him give me a cortisone shot to numb the pain in my foot than it was to tell my coach that I was struggling mentally.
The pain in my foot would return again my sophomore year in college after a very stressful summer, and the pain strangely enough moved to my knee. I began to have headaches, backaches and stomachaches, and I felt like my body was falling apart. College running was dismal at best with chronic pain in areas all over my body.
Deep down inside I knew that I was struggling, but it has always been easier to look tough on the outside as one who has endured physical pain, than it is to look weak on the inside as someone who couldn’t cope with mental setbacks and emotional stress.
It hasn’t been until recently, however, that I have learned about the mind body connection — more clinically known as Tension myositis syndrome (yes, look it up). This has allowed me to come with terms with the emotional setbacks that were causing me physical pain. And as someone who does not suffer from chronic, unexplained pain like I used to, I wholeheartedly believe that the connection is real.
The situations I experienced, I know, are not uncommon, and I have seen them in my own children. My 12-year-old son suddenly has pain in his knees before a basketball game, but that pain goes away after discussing stresses that are happening at school, home and on the court. There’s the pain in my daughter’s wrist that happens when she’s asked to perform tumbling in front of friends in an impromptu situation. And there are the headaches that appear in my 10-year-old most mornings before school, that are in response to his anxieties about school.
As a mom, I’ll admit that it is much simpler to give my kids a few chewable Tylenol tablets and call it a night than it is to sit down and discuss those challenges that plague them daily. But I have noticed that as I have, the physical pains have lessened, and their willingness to open up to me about difficult things has become greater.
I hope that when faced with the pressures of success, my kids will rise to the occasion, knowing that the twinge in their foot will go away — after a good talk with mom or dad.