“Pain is temporary, but glory is forever” is a (perhaps misguided) mantra popular with the ultra-runner community. It was echoing in my head one fateful day in May when I decided to finish a race despite injuring myself early on. A day later I was in crutches, and for the next two months I had to learn to live with limitations I’ve never had to before.

I am walking without my therapeutic boot now, thankful for the whole experience. While it’s fresh in my mind, I want to share some of the benefits of having your leg immobilized, your arms holding crutches, and going from 60 mph to zero on a dime.

Praise the day they wrote the ADA

To get the least personal of these things out of the way, let me sing my praises of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. This is the law that protects the rights of people with disabilities and ensures they have the same level of access as anyone else. Without this law, deaf people could be denied police services when there was no way to communicate with them. Without this law, a person in a wheelchair could be cut-off from enjoying a weekend out with their family because they simply couldn’t get to the restaurants and parks the family planned on visiting.

Thanks to the ADA, the main limitations I encountered was usually from exhaustion or pain in my hands from having to crutch too far, rather than from places not being built to accommodate the disabled.

Every once in a while I did find myself having to hop awkwardly up stairs instead of an elevator or ramp, or having to crab-walk slowly across narrow corridors or footbridges. Fortunately the physical activity of this wasn’t so bad; I was relatively fit and strong when I hurt myself. The thing that stung about these moments were that they were humiliating. People either look at you awkwardly wondering if they should help, or offer to help and quickly realize that short of carrying you, there’s not much they can do. Either way while it’s always well-intentioned, it has the net effect of making you feel pitied. This made me extra-grateful for all the places where the ADA helped to prevent these situations.

So thank you authors of the ADA, and activists for disabled persons’ rights!

Handicap parking is abused, a lot

One of the things I quickly learned is how important disabled parking is, and how often it’s abused.

Being on crutches is exhausting and painful: do it for long enough and it gives you neck pain; your hands hurt like crazy, right before they go completely numb; it takes a ton of energy to carry your body weight with your torso and arms rather than your legs. By day 3, crossing a long parking lot left me aching and dreading the crutch-walk back.

When I finally got my temporary parking pass it changed my world. Before I got it, there were things I just wouldn’t do for myself because of the discomfort and hassle involved. I would avoid going shopping for basic supplies because I had to figure out how I was going to carry any of it back to the car, and because I knew that I’d be in physical pain by the time I was done. The parking pass changed most of that.

Unfortunately, maybe a quarter of the time, handicap parking spaces were being taken up by cars without a placard. I’m not a religious man, but I like to think there’s a special place in Hell for people who abuse handicap parking.

The life you always dreamed of

Now to the positive stuff. Like a lot of people, I’ve wondered what it would be like to pack a bag, hop in my car, and leave my current life behind. I lead a happy life, but sometimes you just wonder how it feels to live a different way, without the routine and stresses that nag at you each day.

In the day after my injury, I suddenly transformed from someone who ran 40 miles a week and hit the gym 2 or 3 days a week, to someone whose main form of exercises was hobbling from one room to another on crutches. Aside from being angry that I might not be able to swim this Summer, my main worry came from how much I expected my life to change because of this sudden decline in activity.

I found that if I didn’t get caught up in negativity, being on crutches didn’t mean living a worse life, it just meant living a different life. In its way, it was a really positive experience. Where before, I always struggled to make time for guitar, I suddenly found way more time for it, and got better at it faster than I have in a long while. A couple hours of most mornings were set aside for my running, but now I had that time for my garden, for more cooking, for more reading. I didn’t become a new person, but I was able to invest in a lot of things that were important to me, things that I wasn’t investing in before because my routine didn’t allow for it.

Being in a boot (temporarily) forced me to live that “whole new life” I’d daydreamed of. It didn’t happen in the same way I had imagined, but overnight the entire world had changed for me, and it was exciting to make a life work in that new world.

People just need an icebreaker

The thing I’ll probably miss most about having the boot and crutches is realizing on a daily basis how much people want to connect, but simply struggle for a way there.

There are people at my office complex that I’ve seen for the last three years who I’ve never so much as exchanged a single word with. Everyone has people in their life like this: you see them every day, you have never said anything to them because you never had a reason to. The exact kind of people who, if you saw them at a bar, you might actually say hello because you are acquainted-by-exposure, if not by any other connection. It was interesting to see how genial and familiar these people were now that they finally had something to talk to me about.

“So I gotta ask, what happened to your leg? I’ve been seeing you clomping around for the last few days.”

At least once a day, usually several times a day, someone who I met would ask me how I ended up on crutches. If I had time, this would almost always lead into longer conversations. For whatever reason, an injured limb (especially when it’s clearly a temporary injury) is a “safe” thing to ask someone about out of the blue, and everyone did. My poor girlfriend had to listen to me tell the same story over and over to strangers who would ask about it.

The whole experience left me with a good taste in my mouth regarding humanity. It’s not that people are colder nowadays, or that they want the isolation that seems to be becoming the norm. It’s just that we don’t know how to / have the means to start connecting.

Vulnerability is the best

One of the best things I got out of needing help from others is that I learned to accept help from others.

When I first got my crutches, I definitely tried stubbornly to do as much as I could on my own. It was hard and rewarding in its own way. I had believed for a long time that I shouldn’t bother others with my problems, and that having the fortitude to address my problems on my own made my character stronger.

To some extent these things are true, but they also completely ignore the significant benefits of being honest about your needs, being open about your weaknesses, and embracing the good will of others’ desires to help. Thankfully, these thoughts had been swirling around my head for a few months prior to my race. I finally saw Brené Brown’s TED Talk titled The power of vulnerability, which had made a resurgence in my Facebook feed, along with interviews about her 2012 book Daring Greatly. She (and others who discuss vulnerability) focus on the many benefits of allowing yourself to be honest about your weakness sometimes.

By letting myself accept others’ help, even inviting their help, I got to put into practice a few lessons that the Universe had been trying to teach me. A lot has been written about this idea, but I’ll summarize the things I experienced myself here:

People like to give. When someone used to offer help I would turn them down because I didn’t want to put them out. I didn’t realize how much this is a lose-lose proposition. People who love you actually want a way to show it to you, and they’re enriched when they get to. It’s fruitless to deny them and yourself that. Hiding vulnerability builds walls, asking for help makes bonds stronger. I had taught myself that being weak made other people like you less. Trying at all costs to hide your weaknesses is a good way to make you un-relatable because , and prevents people from ever learning who you really are, and therefore liking who you really are. Shame is self-perpetuating. I used to be ashamed of my weaknesses for the same reasons I thought that it might make other people like me less. It turns out that when you’re open about those weaknesses, not only do other people react better than you expect, but the shame goes away with it.

To summarize: one thing I learned from asking for help is that owning up to your limitations and flaws is liberating, and allowing others to help you is enriching for you both.

I regret nothing

Running through an injury isn’t the smartest thing in the world to do, but I considered it a worthwhile risk. I have been called “stupid” point-blank more than once for the decision, and there were lots of people who considered my injury proof that what I did was indeed stupid.

It cost me 2 months of mobility, and quite a bit of pain and despair, but in the end I consider it a worthwhile trade. I’m happy that I ended up on crutches. Finishing the longest race of my life was justification enough: I completed a distance that only one in a million people ever will in their lifetimes. Surprisingly, this ended up being secondary to all the other ways I grew from the experience. I don’t know how else I would have learned these things, in a way that would indelibly etch them into my character the way this time has.

I wouldn’t change a thing about any of it.