UltraMedicine

Yesterday a comrade was describing his daughter's semi-obscure illness and without much hesitation I was able to come up with two or three potential diagnoses. Then it flared on me: I've acquired a mini-medical education during the past few years of running, especially on trails and over long distances. There are many reasons:

• runners hurt: maybe less often than most of the population, but for sure differently—a wildly diverse set of problems develop when you're pushing the envelope and applying extreme stress
• runners analyze: they tend to be "close to the machine", listen to their bodies, notice subtle symptoms, study and correlate clues, formulate hypotheses, and then experiment on themselves to fix what's broken, or at least to keep on going
• runners talk: when you're out in the wilderness (or just on the sidewalk) with somebody for hours and hours—training together, trekking together, hurting together, recovering together, finishing together—there are few secrets

So my vocabulary has grown exponentially: metatarsalgia, stress fracture, cœliac disease, piriformis, Prinzmetal's angina, ITB inflammation, hemorrhoids, the Koebner phenomenon, plantar fasciitis, Dequervain's tenosynovitis, hip flexor tightness, etc., etc.—spiffity technical names and homebrew treatments for a menagerie of things that can go awry—not to mention some unmentionably specific female and male "issues". I've enjoyed a lot of pages from this catalog of woes myself. I also now know the maximum "military dosage" for ibuprofen and a few other common pharmaceutical products, along with their potential side-effects, just in case. As the old DuPont slogan used to say, "Better Living Through Chemistry"! (^_^)

(cf. TechnicalMinded (2003-07-18), TrueNames (2003-10-16), HAT Run 2006 (2006-03-31), ...) - ^z - 2008-11-21