Karma doesn't care about you

Just a couple of weeks after I ran my first post runner's knee, walking break-free round, my foot started hurting.

I have had similar foot problems before. The first time was a couple of years ago, after I got hubris and thought I could do 27 km in my VFF. Well, I could, but then I got injured. The second time was just last summer. Both times the problem was the second toe tendon, on top of the foot and halfway to my ankle. Both times I had to take several weeks off from running.

This time, the dull pain came unannounced and with no preceding running hijinks to explain its existence. It just started aching last Tuesday afternoon (on my rest day) and then got worse as the hours passed.

Yesterday, my short lunch-break walk made my foot complain more firmly. So much so, that I came home from work and spent an hour worrying I would miss practice. Wednesday afternoons are easy run days with AIK. Should I run with them or should I rest my foot?

I was getting frustrated. Furious at the injustice of what seemed to be yet another injury, I shook my fist at the sky. Hadn't I paid my yearly injury dues with my runner's knee? Was my body falling apart, finally beaten after years of abuse by way of running? Would I have to take up birdwatching instead? I don't even like birds! 

See? They're evil! By Abode of chaos

I don't believe in karma, or cosmic justice, or ”what goes around comes around”. Just read the news. There's evidence all around us that bad people get away with doing bad things all the time. And there are good people in the world that live in misery, never catching a break, bad things happening to them all the time. The universe is indifferent to our fate, and nothing that ever happens happens for a reason. As much as it would stroke my ego to believe that I am the centre of the universe and all it is there for is to accommodate me and my whims, I find it impossible to actually do so. I'm just not that special. None of us are. To each other maybe, but not in the grand scheme of things.

Still, I couldn't believe that my luck was so rotten, that a deity I don't even believe in would punish me this way (yes, I made up a deity so that I had someone to be angry at. I call him Stan). I refused to accept that I had sustained yet another injury, so close to my latest one. On some level I must have believed that my righteous anger would scare the cosmic powers (=Stan) into admitting that they (=Stan) had messed with the wrong person this time, because I went ahead and joined the AIK practice anyway. My foot sent weak signals throughout the run, but today it's much better than it was yesterday before the run.

It might be too early to say for sure, but I think that the universe might have finally thrown me a bone. Thank you Stan, fictitious deity of my imagination!