Lucky

5 days after spraining my ankle on a trail run, the swelling started increasing instead of going down and the pain started getting worse, so I decided that hope is not a strategy and it was time to get an x-ray. So, I headed off to the ortho urgent care last night and got some pictures taken. The good news is that nothing is broken! Probably! One thing I’ve definitely learned over the last 6 months is that orthopedic medicine is more of an art than a science—- just like with my stress “fracture” last fall, apparently assessing whether or not I have a “capsular avulsion fracture” is a matter of interpretation. But, since they had x-rays on file from my experience in October, they were able to do some comparison and decided that the small shadow the PA was concerned about was probably just part of my anatomy and not evidence that I had sprained a ligament hard enough to pull a small piece of bone off. So, that’s cool. The bad news is that it is a pretty significant sprain and I will be doing more rest/ice/compression/elevation than running for at least the next few days and the 10k I am registered for on Saturday is very much in doubt. All of which got me thinking about luck.

It’s pretty easy for me to argue that I’ve had a bad run of luck over the last 6 months. I’ve had three significant setbacks in my training—- the stress fracture in October/November, pneumonia in March, and now this ankle sprain at the beginning of April. This has overlapped with the general breakdown of society and the economy that seems to be in progress nationally, and significant state level attacks on my profession. Once I lay those points out, I could quickly start lining up other small setbacks sprinkled across that time and assert that I have just had a really bad run of things. But I don’t think that tells the whole story or is a necessarily fair conclusion, which leads me to one of my students competing at the first Zoom-based National Speech and Debate Tournament in June of 2020.

You may remember that Spring/Summer of 2020 was a pretty rough time for, you know, humanity. There was a pandemic, lockdowns, mask mandates at Target that seemed to ruin some people on the internet’s lives… it was a whole thing. I was coaching speech and debate at the time, and our State tournament was scheduled for the Saturday after Tom Hanks got sick, Rudy Gobert touched all those microphones, and everything started to shut down. So, the day before the tournament, which we had been preparing for for a full year and had very strong hopes of winning, everything got cancelled. Our national tournament, which was supposed to be in New Mexico, got moved to this new technology called Zoom and, therefore, students’ basements. It was not a great experience for the seniors on my team in particular.

One of those seniors had a specifically bad experience at the online tournament—- she couldn’t get her technology to work at the beginning of her first round of competition and had to forfeit the round, effectively ending any hope she had of breaking into the elimination stage of the meet. She was devastated by this and elected to withdraw from competition, ending her speech and debate career on a particularly awful note. This was a student who seemed to have a constant run of bad luck— earlier that season, before COVID was a thing, her performance at the state debate tournament was badly compromised when I judge gave her a stern lecture about a small etiquette violation before her first round started, which completely flustered her and led in part to her losing that debate. This was a student who couldn’t seem to catch a break.

But, is that the whole story? Working backward through the story I just told you, she didn’t lose the debate round because she got in trouble with the judge, she lost the debate round because she let that throw her off her game and her performance suffered—- or maybe she was the weaker debater and would have lost that round anyway and the judge confrontation became an easy way for her to tell the story. And she really had broken a small bit of debate etiquette that she should have known about. And she had multiple other rounds of competition at that tournament that she easily could have won had she regained her focus. Similarly, the reason her technology didn’t work in that first Zoom round was largely outside of her control, but she had also made the decision not to participate in the voluntary technology test the day before, and she made the decision to quit on the whole tournament after that first round forfeit— yes, that ended her chances of making the elimination rounds, but everyone involved knew that she wasn’t going to end up as national champion that year anyway, she just made a conscious choice to end her season on that negative note. Yes, it was very sad and unlucky that her senior season was derailed by the COVID pandemic, but there were of course more significant problems caused by the pandemic than the need to move a high school speech tournament to an online format. In fact, that move saved her a few thousand dollars that would have been spent on the trip to New Mexico— that trip would have been fun, but there are plenty of fun and memorable uses that you can put a thousand dollars to, most of which don’t involve spending a week in the desert in a convention center with a bunch of high school teachers and parents.

I read an article a while back about a study on the phenomenon of luck. The people running the experiment surveyed the participants about whether or not they considered themselves to be “lucky” and then put them through a series of trials. The “lucky” people had demonstrably more success. But, this was not the result of some ineffable force that surrounded them. In several scenarios, this was because the “lucky” people were better at observing the world around them— they noticed signs on the wall or messages in the testing material that told them they could stop working and go get $20 from a location. They were also more willing to work through or around adversity. Luck favored the prepared, the observant, and those who were willing to work past setbacks.

Which brings us back to my run of luck over the last 6 months. Yes, I sprained my ankle and have had to miss a few races. But, I sprained my ankle because I was overextending myself on a trail run over dangerous terrain and wasn’t looking down at where I was stepping. And, I sprained it but didn’t break it. And, I will still be able to run the major events I am training for. Yes, I got pneumonia and was pretty sick for a few weeks. But I got pneumonia because I had a gross chest cold and didn’t let myself rest and recover properly so. And yes, it was pneumonia, but I was able to treat it with antibiotics from home instead of a hospital, only missed a few days of work, and was back running by the third week, all of which makes me lucky compared to many other sick people around the country. Similarly, the stress fracture was bad and all the more frustrating because it was probably misdiagnosed, but it was the result of knowing overtraining and wasn’t exactly career threatening. As for the breakdown of society and the economy, well, that’s always happening somewhere from someone’s perspective, and most of the time, for most of the people, it has worked out OK. And if we allow that things are particularly bad right now from many metrics, we also need to allow that my family and I are pretty well positioned to weather the storm compared to many other demographics of people around the country. And no one today would want to trade their problems with someone whose town was being sacked by the Mongols, ravaged by the black death, or in the middle of no-man’s land during World War One.

So, I will ice my ankle, try to walk the dog in a few days, and see about jogging the 10k on Saturday if I’m not in pain. I’ll stay on top of the news and act when I can, but I won’t stay up all night doom scrolling. And I’ll try to keep a focus on the many positive things that are happening every day instead of working to compile a list of the negatives. Wish me luck!

If you’ve made it this far, please consider clicking the Donate Now button up at the top of the page and making even a small contribution to my fundraising project. I’m going to run 5 half marathons this July as part of a 5 state road trip, and the whole thing is a fundraiser for the National Diaper Bank Network. Thanks!