The good parts of being injured.

All through my junior year I’d been having hip pain, but I ignored it and kept running. I ran through the summer and made it to the cross country season of my senior year. My hip hurt extremely bad all the time, but I kept running through it because I didn’t want to miss my season. I ended up running varsity for a meet and PRed by two full minutes. I finished out the season very proud of what I had accomplished, but my hip pain had become unbearable. I couldn’t even sit through a class period because it hurt too bad to concentrate. At this point, I went to the doctor to get it figured out. They took X-rays and didn’t find anything, so I got an MRI. When they did that, they saw that I had a labral tear and bone impingement in my right hip. An injury that is impossible to recover without surgery. There are ways of learning to live with the pain, but it had been so long since I had been pain free that the doctors didn’t want to mess around with physical therapy. We had to jump through a few hoops In order to have insurance cover the surgery, so over the course of the next couple months I went through a numbing shot, a few weeks of physical therapy, and a CT scan to get a 3D model of my hip. The length of time it took to get all these things done made it so I had to choose between losing my senior track season or running through the pain for another season. I couldn’t deal with the pain, so we went with the surgery, and I lost my entire senior track season. At least, I thought I would. I stayed a part of track team and helped coach for a while. I got to connect with the younger runners and go to all of the meets. It was so much fun for me to support my teammates and serve as a mentor for the younger runners. Then, three months after surgery, I got to start running again. It wasn’t much, but it was something. A few weeks after I started running, my coach asked for my times, and said they were times he could enter in a race. I got to run the 800 in two meets. Something I never thought was possible, actually happened. It taught me to never give up. If you work hard enough, you can accomplish the seemingly impossible. Including running in a meet four months after surgery. So take advantage of the challenges that come your way, connect with people, and work as hard as you can to accomplish your goals. It pays off.

- Alexis Miller (@ajcm32401)