Illustration by Karsten Petrat.
Click for larger image.I began running in the 1970s (“jogging,” we called it then), while touring the play Billy Bishop Goes to War, to counterbalance after-hours dissipation. I ran in London, Edinburgh, New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC. I ran in Denver, where there is hardly any oxygen. In Glasgow, I ran with increased speed past tenement yobs with razors in their boots. In Cologne, I ran for two hours, white with fatigue, searching for a street called Einbahnstrasse, which I later learned means “one-way street.” In Regina, I ran with a toque pulled down over my entire head, to avoid freezing my lungs.

And it did me good. I didn’t turn into a dirigible, despite the celebratory excess, and along the way I collected an album of mental snapshots, stamped on the brain with every step — the pounding rhythm of running as slide show.

Of course, as you get older you gain a more nuanced view of cause and effect: specifically, that it has little to do with the will. Yes, the things you always thought bad for you really were bad for you; but a lot of things you thought good for you were also bad for you. You fell prey to one of Donald Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknowns.”

In my case, the light dawned in the spring of 2002. Heading out on my usual five-mile run, I felt a pain in the rump I did not recognize, not muscular but down deep. Like an idiot, I tried to “run it out” and did more damage. I self-medicated with ibuprofen and nearly froze my hip solid with applications of ice, but only when I quit running and took up cycling and yoga did the pain gradually go away. Six months later, it was back — same pain, same place. I only managed to defeat the pain for a couple of months this time, and when it returned, like a dreaded relative, it stayed for good.

Chronic pain is a bore, in more ways than one. Like the social bore, it keeps showing up, poking a pressure point with a horny forefinger, or like the handshake buzzer out of a comic book, delivering unpredictable jolts of what my grandfather called a “lifter” — pain that nearly lifts you to the ceiling. Chronic pain is also boring in that it drills into you. You never get used to it. Rather, the more you get used to it, the less tolerable it becomes. It’s like Air Canada that way.

My forebears would have simply gritted their teeth and put up with it, but at what price? Was my nasty uncle really such a jerk, or was he in pain? And what about that eccentric aunt? Because pain makes you weird, too. After months of hobbling, I started referring to mine as Arthur. I would lurch about the house cursing Arthur aloud, like Jimmy Stewart in that movie about the invisible rabbit.

A grey-haired child of the ’60s, I tried to wax philosophical. For example, pain tells you that you’re alive and not dead. (Any war vet will tell you that the worst wounds are the ones you don’t feel.) And pain means there are blessed moments of relief, when you exclaim, What a lovely thing — I’m not in pain!

But these transcendental tricks were no match for Arthur. Friends told me I was starting to walk like an old man. I got snippy in return, but the fact is I moved less. Facing an errand, I counted the steps. Is it worth getting out of this chair to fetch the newspaper? Hours later, the newspaper would be by the door, and I would be sunk in my chair, still as a toad. When an old acquaintance informed me that in the year before his hip surgery his hair had turned white, I decided an X-ray might be in order.

My GP agreed, though she said it was probably soft tissue, and that a shot of something would do the trick. Within days, a discreet technician was arranging me this way and that on a long table before ducking into a booth to avoid the radiation.

“My goodness,” my GP exclaimed at the result, clinically amused. “You don’t seem to have much hip left.”