Free Running Like a Girl by Alexandra Heminsley Page A

planned and headed home with only two thirds of the run completed. I had to almost drag my leg behind me, despondent at the parade of runners sailing by.
    An hour later, once I’d had a hot bath and changed, the pain across the top of my right leg was still excruciating. It felt as if someone had tightened the ligaments and tendons holding me together. I wanted to stretch and stretch, though it never made anything feel any better.
    I headed out to the tube, on my way to meet a friend at the cinema. I barely made it to the station, almost unable to lift my leg. By the time I reached the South Bank, tears of pain were stinging my eyes. What had happened? I hadn’t fallen or knocked myself. I hadn’t knowingly sprained anything. I had no idea what could be causing such piercing agony, and I spent the length of the film shifting in my seat, longing to know if a decent rest would ease it. As the credits rolled, I dreaded standing.
    Within forty-eight hours, I was sitting in a physical therapist’s consulting room. I was lucky to have been recommended a decent sports therapist. Josie—a dark-haired woman as tiny as she was commanding—was sympathetic and genuinely interested in what was causing my pain. In minutes she had got me down to my underpants and bra and had stuck tiny dots—the sort that usually indicate that a painting has been sold—on my shoulders, hips, elbows, and the backs of my knees. Then she put me on a running machine and told me to jog, which she filmed for a few minutes. The hip pain had eased considerably by then, but I was still wincing.
    Once I was dressed, Josie rewound the footage and looked at it. Then we watched it together, her gaze hard with concentration,mine glazed with the sort of hopeful ignorance I used to reserve for trying to spot the baby in a friend’s ultrasound snapshot. Moments later, Josie looked at me and asked, “Have you had an accident recently that had a large impact on the left-hand side of your body?”
    I had not.
    â€œAnd possibly a secondary impact on the right?”
    Nothing rang any bells. I had been fine for months, perhaps a year. Sure, I often had pain in my pelvis after sitting down for long journeys, and had done since long before I started running, but it seemed like a fair trade-off for a job that saw me mostly sitting at a laptop or curled in bizarre positions reading.
    I gave her a blank look. “No, nothing.”
    â€œAre you sure? You seem to have sustained a pretty big blow,” Josie repeated.
    I racked my brain. Surely I would remember a massive blow to the left-hand side of my body. “No, really, I’m fine.”
    â€œOkay, have you ever been in a traffic accident?” she persisted.
    â€œReally, no, I have never been in a car crash,” I replied, as frustration at her surety bubbled up in me.
    As my mouth formed that final “sh,” the realization hit me with a crash of its own: Four years previously, I had been knocked off my Vespa on Kilburn High Road by an SUV when it turned right without looking and drove straight into me. Sure, I had never been in a car crash. That was because I had been on a scooter. And then in the air.
    As I watched the tape replay again and again, every bit of pain I had felt for the last four years made sense. Josie slowed down the footage and showed me my running gait in motion, complete with all of its attendant weaknesses. At the time of theaccident, I had been checked over and told that, aside from a few ripped muscles, I had sustained no serious injuries. Back then I wasn’t a runner. What was more than evident as I watched myself run on the treadmill, the little dots rising and falling in irregular patterns, was that I had been injured after all. My pelvis was not in the correct place; it had been knocked around by the impact of that huge vehicle. Consequently, my body had adapted around the injury, growing weaker and stronger in equal measure.
    My