Have you read “The Body Keeps the Score” by Bessel van der Kolk? The criticisms about the book’s pseudoscientific claims and the problematic behaviors of the author are valid, but I found his hypothesis that trauma is held in the body to be revolutionary. While the book focuses on severe trauma and PTSD, it provides insightful concepts about the ways all humans accumulate emotional scars that our physical body absorbs, and how signals from our body can help heal our psychic wounds. As a human who uses movement to connect with myself, my environment, and others, this hypothesis appeals to me.
I read the book in 2022, but it took me another year to start EMDR therapy. I approached the practice cautiously as a skeptic but found it to be empowering. In EMDR, a therapist directs their patient to move their eyes back and forth while recalling a traumatic memory. The repetitive motion prompts a subconscious reprocessing of the memory and reframing of perspective. It’s an intense and extensive process. While I have ambitions to conquer deeply rooted anxieties such as my seemingly incurable phobia of water — which has origins in a near-death experience after I became stuck beneath an overturned raft in Utah’s Cataract Canyon in 2001 — I’m still dabbling in easier, more recent traumas.
I started with an October 2021 incident when a truck driver struck me with his side-view mirror while I was pedaling a steep incline along Flagstaff Road. When I started being honest with myself, I recognized that my interest in cycling collapsed in the aftermath. While I’ve embarked on a few long rides and fun bike vacations with friends since then, I no longer self-motivate for the big, ambitious goals that used to sustain me. It’s an issue that is much more complex than a simple fear of traffic (I was grief-struck and depressed during my last attempted bikepacking race at the Utah Mixed Epic in September 2021, and was similarly distraught during my last completion of the Iditarod Trail Invitational in March 2022.) Still, conquering a simple and fresh fear seemed like a good way to start breaching the barriers I’d built over the years. For so many years, I’ve stuffed my deepest emotional traumas — from my insecurities about myself to the dissolution of a longterm relationship to the death of my father — into the baggage of long bike rides.
Yes, the issues with cycling are messy, my therapist acknowledged, so perhaps we could focus on something that would help me reach more immediate goals. At the time — October 2023 — I had just signed up for a 50-mile trail running race in November and had ambitions for two hundred milers in the first half of 2024. My therapist wondered: What is my largest fear associated with trail running?
“Falling.”
It’s probably not an exaggeration to say that for every year of my adult life, I’ve spent at least part of the year healing from some sort of blunt force impact. I’ve never been seriously hurt, but injured enough to experience days or weeks of pain and prevented from participating in a favorite activity because of the injury. The other day, my sister and I were laughing about a nickname I acquired while working for the Idaho Falls Post Register in 2004. On multiple occasions, I would crash my mountain bike over the weekend and limp into work on Monday. One of my coworkers started calling me “Gimpy McStiff” and the name stuck. Even the managing editor called me “Gimpy M” with a straight face. When I realize that was 20 years ago and not much has changed, I have to acknowledge that my accident-proneness is not bad luck. It’s me. The problem is me.
When I searched for a falling scenario to focus on during EMDR, it was difficult to choose. There are so many. I settled on a faceplant at Walker Ranch in November 2022 because it’s undoubtedly the most physical pain I’ve experienced in a running crash — bashing my chin and elbow, cracking several ribs, and bruising my sternum. The incident also has a strong element of uncertainty and fear because I sort of “blacked out” before I fell. That’s the only way I can describe it. One nanosecond I was running fast and free, and then next, my nose was centimeters from the ground.
An interesting thing happens when I engage in EMDR to focus on this incident. I spend only a moment frozen in terror with the image of bits of gravel and the rough surface of a boulder zoomed all the way in. I brace for the shock of pain before my jaw slams into the ground. But this sensation doesn’t come. What does come is a kaleidoscope of pain: A gashed knee, an elbow wound filled with dirt, a throbbing ankle, a bleeding forehead, a torn MCL, a broken toe. All of these old injuries reverberate and I sense that I am filled with scars, that I am built of scars, a rickety and broken thing that can never be whole again.
The next emotion I feel is anger because I have nothing to blame but myself.
“I’m sorry that you have a hard time with your proprioception so you end up falling more,” my sister said to me in a video message yesterday. “You can do a lot of balance work, but I think it’s your brain connections with your body, and yours aren’t as connected for whatever reason. I don’t know if it’s genetics or the way you’re born or your neurological systems, who knows? … Some people just have this. There’s nothing you can do about it really. It’s a risk and if you’re doing the activities you want to do, it is the risk. Sometimes I wonder if poor proprioception is a part of our family, and maybe it was part of Dad, and unfortunately for him, it might have been the reason he died — just a simple misstep.”
That cuts right to the core of it. I lost my father in a fall. How much longer until I lose myself? It seems a matter of statistics. But what can I do? Do I just quit moving through the world? Give up the trail running and cycling and hiking because I’ve proven that I’m a danger to myself not just in dangerous situations, but in all situations. I need to cover myself in bubble wrap to walk to the store. My family and I have joked about this, too.
But I can’t give up the joy of moving my body through the world. I’d rather take my chances. Dire as they sometimes seem.
My recent injury has surprisingly taken a lot out of me. It happened on Sept. 5. Beat and I were in Switzerland, returning after a long climb up a mountain. We descended a steep, rock-coated track in the rain, and I started jogging to match Beat’s pace. I slipped on some roller skate rocks, threw both feet in the air and took a hard hit on my tailbone and left elbow.
Less than a week later, I was back in Colorado and sitting in the office of an orthopedic doctor, who took an X-ray and diagnosed me with a sprain to the medial collateral ligament. The treatment seemed straightforward. Rest, ice, gentle physical therapy. Thanks to miracle laser work from my physical therapist, Sue, the extensive bruise on my backside healed quickly. But this elbow, damn. It’s still stiff. It’s still swollen. It’s better than before, but that doesn’t stop it from keeping me up at night, making driving painful, and preventing outdoor bike riding (not that I’m clambering to do that right now, though, if I’m being honest.) And I’m in pain. It’s nerve pain, an impingement of my ulnar nerve that sends electric shocks reverberating through my arm into my pinkie and fourth fingers.
I remember the experience of persistent nerve pain when I had carpal tunnel syndrome in 2016. A dark cloud billowed over my life, becoming angrier and stormier until I finally relented to carpel tunnel release surgery. As the incision healed, it felt as though the sun was coming out for the first time in months. The cloud lifted and the pain dissipated. Ever since, I’ve carried deep empathy and respect for people who endure chronic pain. Any amount of chronic pain is not something I’d wish on anyone. I don’t want to go back there.
No, I don’t want to go back there, but I am weak in both body and mind. I saw the doctor on Tuesday and it only took until Friday before I felt a little stir-crazy and decided I could justify a long hike in Rocky Mountain National Park. I climbed for nine miles to Hallet Peak without incident, but as I looked over toward Otis Peak, I was overtaken by the desire to climb something new.
Unfortunately, Otis requires more scrambling than Hallet. It’s all class 2, inconsequential stuff, but it’s surprisingly difficult to negotiate a minefield of large boulders with a bad arm. I regretted my choices by the time I summited Otis, but by then I had no choice but to scramble down — the direction where gravity worked against me rather than for me. Each time I braced my body to hop down another refrigerator-sized boulder, my ulnar nerve emitted a shock of pain that was breathtaking in scale and clear in its message: STOP DOING THAT. But I needed the leverage to safely descend the boulders. At that point, it seemed to be a choice between temporary nerve pain that may or may not have long-term consequences, or relying entirely on my legs by leaping and potentially falling on a remote mountain peak at 12,000 feet with a long, cold, windy night just hours away. So nerve pain it was. I begged forgiveness from my arm. I was so penitent. No one believes me, especially those who know and love me, but I truly was filled with regret.
Afterward, I sent a remorseful e-mail to my physical therapist, who reassured me that the damage likely wasn’t permanent. Since then my PT sessions have gone well. I still have nerve pain and a lot of swelling, but it’s only been two weeks, the PT reminded me. These things take time.
How much time? After all, the body keeps the score. My tally already feels so high. I have a licensed professional counselor helping me sort out the reverberation of bodily injuries and a physical therapist reassuring me through my remorse. Through it all, I don’t know what to do. I really don’t.
To soothe myself, I sing one of my all-time favorite verses. It’s from a song called “Home” by Field Report:
And the body remembers what the mind forgets
Archives every heartbreak and cigarette
And these reset bones, they might not hold
Yeah but they might yet