A "New" Athlete

Oh, the life of a recovering injured person.  Days of sometimes killer isolation, spent in rigorous physical therapy, with not much time for anything else.  These are my days as of late.  I am now pushing almost 3 weeks since my knee surgery, almost to the halfway point of life in my knee brace!  Since I have to keep my leg straight while in the brace, this tends to present a lot of different dilemmas that many of us don't realize that we take for granted.  Have you ever tried to go to the bathroom while having to keep your leg straight and elevated?  Don't be surprised if you "have an accident" or two.  I know...too much info...but it happens!  :-)  Also, trying to get yourself in and out of a car with a straight leg is quite a chore-and-a-half as well.  Is there anyone out there that keeps their legs straight while on a leisurely drive to your destination?  I didn't think so. 
Aside from all of these new and sometimes daunting tasks that make up my day, I am beginning to embrace my new life as what I call a "normal person."  (Marathon runners are crazy people...they're not normal. LOL!)  After all that's happened to me, I still consider myself an athlete at heart, but I have begun to realize that the challenges I am now dealing with have forced me to stare into the face of a different path.  When you have been as athletic and active as I have been most of my life, you tend to get pigeon-holed into a corner.  It is a natural human tendency to place labels on people and to say that the "label" is who they are as a person, when in reality, that label has more in common with WHAT THEY DO.  I guess the best example I can come up with at the moment would be Tiger Woods.  Tiger is obviously known best for being one of the greatest golfers of all time.  When an athlete gets to that level of play, they become superhuman in our eyes.  They can do no wrong while we elevate them to a perfect, godly level, all the while telling our kids to idolize them as role models.  Then the nation saw as Tiger's personal life unraveled in the media circus that it became.  All of a sudden America was hit with the harsh reality that Tiger wasn't that perfect idol...that perfect golfer that we all knew.  He was (dare we think it?)....human.  We had pigeonholed him into that group of superhuman professional athletes that were somehow ABOVE  the rest of us "common folk."
I say all that to say this...
All of my life people have pretty much known me as "the athlete," or "the runner,"  or (from the high school days) "that buff chick."  I got the feeling that most people really didn't take much time to think outside the "athlete" box, so to speak.  When I got injured after all the work that I had put in to get to the Boston Marathon, I got a lot of sympathy and pity looks, as well as questions of what I would now do with all my new-found "non-running" time!  This would give me a good laugh.  :-)  Not many people knew this, but I never really LOVED running.  Many people have a love/hate relationship when it comes to running.  I LOVED racing, but I really didn't like all the training that had to precede it.  I have mainly ran all these years for the simple reason that it is a great workout.  Running and racing have a way of challenging you and testing your discipline on a higher plane, and there are not a lot of workouts that can say the same.  I reached nearly every goal that I set for myself both in my marathoning and other athletic endeavors, and I can sleep well at night knowing that.  When I started to tell people all of this, I realized it was beyond their comprehension.  They couldn't fathom how someone could do something consistently for 20+ years that DIDN'T give them complete pleasure.  All I can say is that sometimes you have to endure the hard stuff with the good stuff if you want to enjoy success at the "next level" of something. 
As much as we would all like it to, success doesn't always come with an easy path.
In a way, the injuries I have faced have been good for me.  See people have a tendency to pigeonhole themselves sometimes too.  During my times of recovery and solitude I have learned who I am "beyond the athlete."  I have found new interests, new talents that I realized were buried under my athletic build, like a flower budding its way out of the dirt in the new hope of springtime.  And I am realizing that I can still be athletic when this injury is done with...just in a different way now.  I am now entering a different phase of life.  A period, like the springtime, that will shed new light on other kinds of success stories that I will be able to look back on and celebrate.  That I can be thankful for.