My clunky knee and the dark night of the soul

or how novel shapes help get you through the tough stuff

I am held together with spit and hope. And possibly some stupidity.

I am very lucky that I am able to have a partial knee replacement in late July. I’m unlucky, I suppose, that while I do not possess the athletic gifts of once and again Olympic skier Lindsey Vonn, I do possess the same deterioration (read: utter absence of) the meniscus on the outside of one of my knees.

if only this were me not Vonn

I am now at what we novelists would call the two-thirds point of a story that began one day when I was in middle school. Ski ballet was new and cool (yes), and I, without knowing a damn thing about it, decided to do something I’ve been incorrectly calling a “royal stem christie” which involved lifting one leg behind me to rest my ski on my shoulder while gliding gracefully down the slope. This was all well and good on Waterville Valley’s Valley Run novice trail. Until I fell weirdly and strained a ligament.

If we were following what the much-loved and acclaimed novel genius Mary Carroll Moore describes as the W shape of a novel, we would know that, after that New Hampshire day, I went on to have figurative ups and downs with that same knee.

• The time I fell badly in Colorado and drove my ski tip-first into the snow while my leg was still attached.

• The time I ran what was supposed to be my third marathon on tendinitis and pulled up at mile ten, having torn (no underachiever, I) both my vastus medialis (that’s the quad) and my hamstring.

• The time I had been playing goalkeeper for my over-forty soccer team because it was (seriously) a way to minimize concussion risk but, late in a boring game, went out to play striker for some action and planted my left foot for a shot and strained the ACL.

The ups between those figurative downs were years and years of putting that left knee (and its partner that seems [knock on wood] to have sailed through a decades-ago arthroscopy without ever looking back) through serious paces—on skis, in a sculling shell, on a bike, and running all over the place.

So, all in all, not bad.

my own schematic based on the work of Benjamin Percy and Mary Carroll Moore

But now here we are at that two-thirds mark—which also coincides with the well-known novelistic "Dark Night of the Soul”. The moment when, after the first and second big up and down, the down is sooooo low that it feels like—to use another novelistic term—”all is lost”.

From this nadir of hope and expectation comes . . . the Ossur Unloader One.

if you look at it sideways, it kind of has a W embedded in it

I wish I could say that this lightweight exoskeleton was solving all my problems until surgery date. But it’s not. It’s helping, but it can’t do away with a surprising and almost amusing new sensation in this battered knee remnant of mine. Clicking and clunking and occasionally popping. It’s amazing. I am a living piece of breakfast cereal and if you’re sitting near me on the plane to London this Sunday, maybe you’ll hear me snap, crackle, and pop, too.

Why the plane? Because two years ago, I decided that someday I would run something called the Great Lakeland 3-Day. It’s a, you guessed it, three-day trail-running event in the Lake District in northern England, during which you run any one of a selection of routes and finish at a base camp where your stuff gets toted to during the day. Last year’s dates coincided with lots of book events for Last Days in Plaka, so I couldn’t do it then. But this year, it coincides with my birthday. What better way to celebrate getting older than to go to a country I lived in for four important years, and run up and down the fells, with my husband and friends in tow.

I hadn’t allowed for the pesky knee. I hadn’t foreseen another downturn in the W of my knee-joint narrative.

So, held together with hope and spit and some cortisone from last month, and the spiffy unloader brace, off I will go. I will not be selecting the routes I originally planned to do. I’ll be dialing it back. My goal now is very simple.

I have calculated that I can complete an average daily 14 miles in no more than six hours—even at a fairly leisurely fast-hike pace of 2.5 mph. Which still gets me to base camp in time for the cake and tea they give you at the end of each day. Cake pace! for the Great Cakeland 3-Day¹. And make it birthday cake, won’t you?

The Dark Night of the Soul is not fun. I am doing a fair bit of mental gymnastics (but not any royal stem christies, thankyouverymuch) to stay positive about this. It’s going to hurt like a mother. I’ve been told I’m not going to make things any worse, though, so it’s up to me and my pain tolerance (which, alas, is fairly high [see above: stupidity]. I will do my best to stay positive while on my chosen route for each of the three days, enjoying the views, enjoying the company of a friend or friends, should they choose the same as me, and definitely enjoying the group of friends in the afternoons and evenings along the way. I am bringing ice packs.

Come July 29, I’ll be on the upswing of the final leg (ha!) of this particular narrative W. Unlike a novel character, I have the benefit of foresight. I know the Dark Night will end with a happy denouement. As a character in my own story, I will get what I wanted, and I will be happy that I got it. Wish me luck!

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If you want a laugh, here’s a clip that includes some ski ballet from the ‘80s and ‘70s.

1. Credit for this goes to Nikos Strongylos!