Surgery to 60KM

Or, embarking on a test of limits

I’ve thought long and hard about whether to say anything about my next athletic goal. I didn’t want to make an announcement about a goal I wasn’t sure that I could meet. I didn’t want to jinx my attempt by making the evil eye aware of my ambitions. I didn’t want to put myself in a position to receive scoldings, or head-shaking concern. I thought that, if I kept it secret, then it would be a wonderful surprise when, lo and behold, I achieved this thing that I’d sneakily been training for over several months.

Then last week Terrell Johnson over at The Half Marathoner asked the question “What do you want to do this year?”, and I felt I had to answer him.

💬 What do you want to do this year?

I staked my claim, planted my flag. I want to run the Zagori Mountain Running event at the 60km distance on July 18th.

If you’ve been reading this newsletter for even a little while, you’ll know that the Zagori race has become an annual tradition for me. I first raced the 10km on a lark on zero training (I was pretty much only rowing back then), and then moved up in distance to the 44km event they had for many years. I had hoped to run the 60km in 2025. But my left knee—specifically one of the three compartments of my left knee—had other plans. I dialed back to the 21km event last summer, and, ten days later, had a partial knee replacement.

I am almost at the six-month mark now—six months after surgery. My left knee still has some swelling in it, which my orthopedist’s practice assures me is normal, and I can tell by just looking that my left quad is a bit smaller than my right. But the knee does pretty much everything I ask of it. Skiing of all kinds (xc, skate, uphill, downhill), rowing (indoors now. I do not have a death wish.), cycling (ditto), strength training, hiking. And running.

I can run!

This is a divisive statement to make, in the context of a partial knee replacement. Many people will find my statement foolish or alarming. Many will remind me that the new part (a prosthesis, as it’s known) will wear down more quickly if it’s subjected to such stresses. I have heard it. I am going forward with open eyes and all the advice and information that I need. I’m giving it a try.

Why? Because of Lindsey Vonn. Sort of. As my friend the orthopedist explained to me before my decision to have surgery, I had Lindsey Vonn’s knee. Like her, I had two healthy knee compartments and one wrecked one. So, like her, I had surgery to replace not the whole knee, but just a part of it.¹

actual X-ray of my actual left knee

I am aware that while I underwent essentially the same knee surgery as Vonn, I am a couple of decades older and several orders of magnitude more human than she is. Still. What we learn from Vonn’s training and recovery even before she proved herself ready to astonish the world with her skiing prowess is that it is possible to improve.

Duh, I hear you saying.

And yet. How often do we accept the idea that we are losing ground as we get older? How readily do we joke about the indignities of aging? As a culture, we are steeped in a casual acceptance that to get older is to yield (weirdly, even as our same culture insists that it’s not cool to “give in” to the natural facts of aging when it comes to appearance). Vonn’s rehab was incredible. Her training for the imminent Olympics is awe-inspiring. Even if we’re not like her, we can improve.

Lindsey Vonn, post-op

I’m writing this all down publicly (though I have no illusions of my Substack’s reach) to give a name to my hitherto inchoate goal and announce to myself if not to anybody else that I’m officially beginning.

My physical therapy is already morphing into plain-old strength training. It will have to keep developing so that I can really build not just back to where I was pre-surgery but better. My running, which is now still in the run/walk mode, will need to slowly and carefully increase so that I can run without a walk-break, and eventually run for several hours at a time. I’ve done this all before, for 44km and 50km races. I can do it again.

Improving is hard (again, I hear you saying “duh”). Not because it’s hard to lift heavier and heavier weights, or run longer each week. But because of the mind’s resistance to change.

I am no evolutionary anthropologist, but I’d venture to say that we humans are, in essence, conservative. Not politically, but psychologically. I think our instinct is to nest, gather, consolidate, preserve. If we’re having to strive and strain and reach and grasp, we’re living at a level of tension that’s not healthy—and that we wouldn’t do by choice.

Sports is weird this way, because to participate in most sports is to engage in a kind of stress cosplay.² What do cross-country skiers do but cosplay explorers from another era? What is trail running but survival cosplay? As athletes, we don’t have to push ourselves to limits. But when we participate in most sports at a serious level, that’s exactly what we choose to do. (See this profile of the astonishing Kílian Jornet in the New York Times, where he talks about suffering.)

If I’m going to really work towards this goal of running a 60km mountain trail race³, then I will have to fight the instinct to accept and be pleased with where I am. Recovery-wise, I mean. Sure, I’ll need to include some consolidation periods, because without them the body can’t truly get stronger. It’s also important not to rage rage against the dying of the light just for the sake of raging. Sometimes the body has important messages for us that we must heed. And I will heed them. But overall, over the course of almost six months, I’m going to have to keep reaching for what’s better, what’s next, what’s harder. I will have to sustain a sort of state of long-term dissatisfaction, so that I can hope to toe the start line in Tsepelovo July 18th better than before.

Ugh. To be honest, part of me just wants to say forget it right now.

Drop back to a shorter distance, have a nice winter and spring skiing and running like a person who just likes being outdoors. But I won’t. Not now, not yet. I’ll leave open the possibility that there may come a moment when this plan reveals its folly to me. Until that moment comes—if it comes—I’ll go forward. If instinct is to be conservative, I’ll be a radical.

25 weeks of training start Monday. Wish me luck!

1. Notably, her surgery was robotically-assisted, and her prosthesis was tailored exactly to the contours of her knee and the movement of her gait. Mine was a bit more off the rack, though my surgeon was exceptional.

2. I’m now reminded of the time I was in my ancestral village in Greece, rowing on the ergometer outside in the courtyard, and a neighbor came to bring me bread she’d baked. I was mortified by her generosity in that particular moment. She was impressed by my work, she said. But who was really working? She was the one who had made the bread and the yogurt that went with it, and I was just pretending.

3. Did I mention the 12,000 feet of elevation gain and the cut-off at 20km that you have to reach in 4:45?