Feel

I've had this lingering pain in my knee for awhile now. I hurt it on a 12 mile run when I decided that I would run sub 7 minute miles for the last 2 miles of the run. It felt great to run that fast but as soon as I stopped both of my knees were throbbing. The left one healed quickly but the right one is still giving me pain. That was 4 weeks ago.

This knee pain is interesting in that it isn't something that stops me from running. I'm the biggest wimp of them all when it comes to pain but this pain is something I can run through. It just bugs me during the run and causes me to limp for a few hours after.

So in true Willie form I decided to make this pain go away with the help of vitamin-I. So I started taking Ibuprofen before my runs and I had no pain for a few runs. My theory was that since I could run through this pain and it wasn't getting any worse I might as well mask it. Why be annoyed?

As with most of my plans it worked for awhile but failed miserably in the end. The problem wasn't my knee though, it was my stomach. I hadn't taken Ibuprofen regularly for a long time and it seems my stomach had become happy with not having this drug around. I, of course, didn't come to this conclusion myself. I had to be told. I was taking massive amounts of Tums everyday and was still having heartburn during my runs. It took my fabulous girlfriend to finally put two-and-two together and remind me that I had started taking Ibuprofen at the same time my heartburn started. So I stopped taking the pain killer and have run heartburn free ever since.

My knee pain, however, is still lingering.

My point here is concerning the importance of feeling. I spend a lot of time and money trying to cover up feelings in all aspects of my life. The perfect example of this is described above. In trying to cover up a pain I ended up creating yet another pain that I tried to cover up. This chain could have continued until I was covering up so many pains I would have forgotten what I originally started covering up.

Feeling is an important part of being human. Every feeling means something and has a root cause. Covering up these feelings is, in some ways, betraying the gifts of being human. Pain, fear, love, anticipation, irritation, frustration. Both humans and animals can feel these things but only humans can feel them and understand them and possibly learn from them to make ourselves better.

Thanks for listening