"Walk it off!"

For the first few years of high school, I had a gym teacher who had one answer for anything that happened to you in gym class.

Hit in the face with a volleyball? "Walk it off!"

Body-checked into the bleachers during floor hockey? "Walk it off!"

Ruptured your spleen during football? "Walk it off!"

OK, that last one didn't happen, but it could have. "Walk it off" was his stock answer for everything, to the point that it was jarring when we got another gym teacher later in high school who was all, "Do you want to switch teams so that you're not skins? Are you not feeling well, and just want to walk the track today? Do you want to help me referee? Maybe we need three or four refs for this," it was mentally jarring to have a teacher in gym who actually seemed to acknowledge that high school is a terrible time that couldn't always be walked off.

During our few years together, I imagined a number of things happening to that first teacher. I imagined him on fire. I imagined him crushed beneath the wheels of a school bus. I imagined him having a heart attack while screaming at someone in the middle of the gym, and all of the students running for help while I stood over him and whispered, "Walk it off", but I never imagined that, later in life, I would hear his voice in my head, and somehow find it inspirational.

Friday night, as part of the Great Smoky Mountains Half Marathon weekend, I took part in the 5K. When I did the half marathon last year and the year before I didn't do the 5K the night before, but I was unhappy with my performance last year and decided that if I was going to do this again this year, then I was going to challenge myself, and do more than just complete a half marathon. If you do the 5K on Friday and the half marathon on Saturday, they call it the Black Bear Double, and I signed up for it.

(Let's take a moment to recognize that over the course of a few years I've changed from a person who couldn't complete a half marathon to a person who feels that completing one isn't quite enough of a challenge. Holy shit. Who am I?)

Some people were pushing themselves on the double, which followed a lollipop-shaped course: there was a straight mile, a circular loop for a mile, and then you retraced the straight mile back to the starting and finishing line. I was between the first and second mile marker when the first runner heading toward the finish came back heading the other direction, but most of us were not pushing ourselves hard. Much of the back of the 5K was people who were doing the Black Bear Double, and we were all talking to each other about how we wanted to get an OK 5K time but not use up too much energy before the half marathon tomorrow. Everything was going according to plan, and then we got to the loop.

The loop was in a field.

The 5K was not advertised as a partial trail run, and the field didn't even have a trail. It had a path where a lane had been cut into the grass, and we had to follow it for a mile. At first I thought maybe I had just missed that part of the course description, but then everyone around me started complaining about it, too, especially the guy pushing someone in a wheelchair. I've never trail run before, but I've hiked, and I know that there's always a hole or a root or a rock waiting to trip you the minute you let your guard down. Sure enough, the second I realized that I was twenty feet from finishing the loop and getting back on the paved walkway, I looked ahead instead of at the ground and gave my ankle a good, hard roll.

It hurt.

It hurt a lot.

I staggered for a moment, and the two women walking with me both asked if I was ok, since they'd both seen me almost go down. Before I could answer, I heard a voice in my head.

"Walk it off."

I still had a mile of 5K to go, and then 13.1 miles in the morning. I could decide I was too injured to do either of those things, but I knew in my heart that was a lie. I've twisted my ankle before, and I knew it wasn't sprained. It would be sore, but I was not unable to finish. There was a guy behind me pushing someone in a wheelchair through grass, for Christ's sake, and I was going to crybaby about my sore ankle? I walked it off.



Then, the next morning, I walked again. Since my ankle actually was still sore in the morning, I changed my goal a little. While my original thought was that I wanted to beat last year's time, I decided that due to the injury I would just set a goal of finishing while favoring my ankle, and let my speed be my speed. Fortunately, the race rules have changed a little, and the sweeper at the end is a four hour pacer, rather than 3:30, like my first year, and I figured the extra half hour was enough of a cushion that I could walk at a normal pace, not jog on the downhills, and could baby the ankle a little while still finishing. Resigned to my slightly new goal, I shifted myself back from the 2:30-3:00 hour starting wave into the 3 hour plus starting wave, and that's where I met Gwen and Dennis:



They're a married couple from California who started doing half marathons for fun, and we walked together and talked for the entire race. We discussed our jobs (Gwen's retired), Tennessee (it was their first trip to our state, and they were pleasantly surprised by most of it; the exception being the Confederate flags they saw in a few places), food (they like the ribs here), classic horror movies (Dennis feels that Adrienne Barbeau was cast in so many because she was good at screaming, while Gwen and I agree that she was cast for something on her chest that wasn't quite her lungs), and pretty much anything else that popped into our heads while we made the slow trek from the high school to the finish line. At Mile 12, Gwen decided she wanted to jog the last part, so she went ahead and Dennis and I walked the rest of the way in together.

I got my finisher medal, and an extra medal for doing the Black Bear Double:





Overall, it was a very pleasant experience, except for my foot. Right around Mile 9 I thought, "Jesus, I think I have a blister." The same thing happened to me during the same part of the course last year, and sure enough, right around Mile 10 I felt intense pain in my foot, and then it slowly diminished through the rest of the race, meaning that the blister had probably exploded. When I finally got back to my hotel room, it turned out that I was right, but rather than show you a picture of my foot I'll just show you one of my sock:



It hurt a lot. Yesterday, after the race, I could barely walk on it. Overnight, the swelling has gone down quite a bit, and it's stopped leaking blood and fluid (whatever that is inside of blisters), but while I was thinking about it I realized that the problem is not, as I suspected last year, my shoes or how tightly I lace them. It's this specific course. I do eleven and twelve mile training walks without this happening. I've done another half marathon twice without this happening, but two out of three times that I've done this one on its terribly canted course surface and come away with a terrible weeping foot blister.

I haven't made a final decision yet, but I think I'm not going to do this race again.

Or I might just accept the blisters, and walk them off.