Colleen-Smith Model of Grief Acceptance

This past week kind of sucked for me. There were some good moments, but the over-arching theme of the week was huge amounts of suckiness. Amplifying the suckiness even further, is the fact that I can’t really run right now. I mean I could run if I had to, but since Hood to Coast my IT band has been the worst ever and it kind of hurts when I just walk. I’m definitely not one of those people who can claim to deal with their problems or stress by running, but I guess when nothing is going well, it’s at least one thing that I can do that doesn’t suck. But what about when life is extremely stressful and I can’t run? Obviously I have to first deal with the grief of being injured and unable to run before I can deal with any other problems in my life.

Today I finally got around to opening up last month’s Runner’s World magazine, and found that Mackenzie Lobby has specific guidelines on exactly how to handle this devastation. She breaks the mental process of being injured into some familiar steps:

1. Denial
2. Anger
3. Bargaining
4. Depression
5. Acceptance

Some quick internet-based research taught me that this is a typical Kubler-Ross model, also known as the “five stages of grief.” Lobby elaborates on all of these of course, and gives advice like “listen to your body!”, “a positive outlook… may be your greatest weapon!”, and “fill your new-found downtime with other activities!” She doesn’t actually use all those exclamation points, but I feel that they emphasize how obnoxious this article felt to me.

I was primarily annoyed by this article because I really could have used an article that actually tells me how to not care that I can’t run. As well as one that better understood my stages of grief, which go something like this:

1. Anger
2. Frustration
3. Depression
4. Recovery

I don’t really do the denial thing when I get injured. I’m well aware of whether or not I’m injured, but I do get super pissed off and try to run through it anyway. When this makes the issue worse, I get really frustrated, usually have to stop running, and then get really sad about it. I’ve certainly never had anything resembling acceptance when it comes to running injuries. I always just get better after a given amount of time, and it’s no longer an issue.

Or maybe I do adhere to the Kubler-Ross model and just made up my own model because I want to feel special and different from everyone else who goes through injury-grief. My main point of contention with this article is that it gave no miracle cure for the situation. I was hoping to read something like, “drink a gallon of muscle milk every day for a week, and any injury you had will definitely be gone.” Not only did I want to read something like that, but I wanted it to be true.

I’m envious of those troubled artists or musicians you always hear about – the ones that turn their pain into prodigal works of art. As a runner/blogger, I’m afraid that my problems only make me whiny and drastically narrow my range of subject matter. Good thing I have stupid articles from Runner’s World to critique. Okay not stupid – but the article was extremely generic and obvious. I don’t want to hate on Runner’s World though, this month there was also a great article that answered all of my physiological running questions. Things like, “Why do I poop so much when I run?” and “Why do my toenails fall off?” and “What makes my nose run constantly while I’m running?” The answers to these questions aren’t very interesting, but I enjoy knowing that they’re issues for other people too. I don’t want to be the only runner out there pooping and missing toenails and dripping snot all over the place.

And for those of you who only read my blog in hopes of seeing more pictures of my awesome dog: