The Scarlet Letter

Ms. RoboCop

I’ve spent the last two weeks wearing an obnoxious boot. The kind of boot that made people reference RoboCop and Transformers and Frankenstein when they saw me.

If I can be dramatic for a few paragraphs, this boot’s been my Scarlet Letter. I earned it for stupidity. Every day, multiple times a day for two weeks, the boot was an attention-getter, a people-stopper.

People started asking questions. Family members, friends, coworkers, grocery store clerks, construction workers, strangers on the street, and sources with whom I work wanted to know what happened. And every time, especially in the beginning, I had to share the whole annoying story of how I got hurt. And, in some cases, they just wanted an opportunity to share their story about the time they had to wear a boot.

The more I told my story about my stress injury, of running through significant pain for three weeks without backing off, the stupider I felt about how it happened. When it’s only you who knows what you’ve done to your body, it doesn’t seem like such a big deal. When you have to tell dozens of people that you ignored your body for a race, you begin to realize how crazy that sounds.

I still plan to run the marathon two weeks from Sunday. My doctor said, simply, to listen to my leg. I will take it easy in the coming days, slowly easing back into running and only running a few miles at a time until the big day.

I no longer have to wear the Scarlet Letter. But I know where it is. It’s ready to shame me if I decide to be stupid again.