Why do you run?

The gentle, soft spoken man balances a clipboard on one knee, pen poised in hand, listening carefully while I explain my habits before going on to tell him the history of a badly compromised heel. He starts scribbling while I talk.

It gets me outside, I said. With my dog. It gives me a shot of feel-good, of course, I said. And I like the color that comes into my cheeks after a good run. And I feel energized by it for hours afterwards.

He is nodding and writing.

And where does your foot hurt when you run?

I tell him it is medial at the start of a run, but often moves once I get going, radiating around the heel to the outside of it, just under the ankle bone. So…lateral—I guess it also hurts laterally. He uses the end of his pen to point to various places on my foot to make sure he understands.

And would you call the pain an ache, or a throb, or is it more of a sharp pain? Is there a burning sensation when you feel it?

Yes.

You mean, it burns?

No, I mean yes, all of those things you said: it aches, it throbs, or it is sharp. Or it burns. It can feel like somebody grabbed a bit of flesh with needle nose pliers from the inside, and then twisted. Hard. But I don’t have to be running to feel it; sometimes it can happen to me while I’m sleeping, and it is bad enough to wake me. Or when I’m sitting still at my desk, minding my own business. Sometimes I feel pain then, too.

Then he asks about the history of my bum foot.

Stress fracture to the calcaneus some number of years ago, I explain. Posterior tibial tendonitis, made worse by Haglund’s deformity, or the “pump bump” in common parlance. My orthopedist down in Knoxville said the tendon was fraying from friction with the bony Haglund protrusion. Pump bump is pretty funny, I quip, because I never wear heels. Ever. It took a ballet school dad, an ER physician, to finally point out the obvious: you may not wear heels, but you’re putting your foot in that position—with your heel elevated—hundreds of times a day in your line of work.

And you still run? asks the kind man.

Yes, I tell him unapologetically. In a perfect world, I explain, I would have the expensive, risky surgery (which of course would not come with risks in this fictional scenario) to fix the Haglund’s, if that window is still open in the first place—when the problem gets bad enough, no surgery can fix it—and then I would be booted and rest obediently while somebody brought me tea and finger sandwiches, and then I’d do physical therapy diligently. Et, voilà—the foot would be fixed. I don’t know that world, but I do know life is a balance. And speaking only for myself, of course, I have discovered I am worse off when I don’t run. Therefore I run.

This is what I tell the gentle practitioner of acupuncture, who is about to stick needles into me everywhere. He explains why he needs to stick needles in my back, even though I need help with my foot; it is something about cleansing. Maybe it will be like a bloodletting, I think: maybe he will exorcise this ugly foot demon out of me, right out of the teeny pinholes he is about to poke all over me.

But probably not. Somewhere in my head I can hear a wise person opining about a therapy’s being effective only when positive thinking goes along with it. I try to think positively when I am asked to inhale and exhale each time another needle goes in. When this kind practitioner, this gentle therapist, places a needle under my bum ankle bone, right on the outside where there is not much flesh, I feel a sharp pain, then nothing, and then another, sharper pain inches away in the soft flesh under my foot, a delayed reaction: I estimate it is somewhere between the third and fourth metatarsal. My eyes are watering and I am trying to stay calm. And positive.

The practitioner is reassuring, telling me this is all normal, but to say something if the pain does not subside. It finally looses its grip and I try to concentrate instead on the new-agey music and the fountain over in the corner of the room while I wonder, laying here like a human pin cushion, why feet can’t be swapped out, like hips, or knees.

*  *  *

Yesterday Vermont winter also loosed its grip. I had promised Scout for days we’d go find an adventure; I reminded him in the morning that we would. He paced nervously around the house waiting for me to finish baking biscuits for the church freezer, and setting up the stew in the slow cooker, and starting a load of wash, before I finally started pulling on my stretchy, wintry running clothes.

He yawned and whined in anticipation on the car ride to our new running spot, standing in the back seat and wagging his tail all the way there. Trembling with excitement while I leashed him, he told me I was a slow poke and really could anybody go any slower? The other dogs are already running, he lamented.

And then our moment finally came: down the dirt road the two of us bounded, stopping to mark piles of rotting leaves one of us, and maybe a few remnant piles of filthy snow from the last storm, to sniff some horse poop, to look in the treetops for those vexing squirrels, and sometimes to point. Scout, I tell him, you really are a gundog. You’ll have to make your peace with pretending, friend.

Powering up a long, steep hill, it dawns on me we have not run since a week or so before Christmas. It has been one thing and then another. Snow and more snow. Then ice. And unrelenting cold. We had flood warnings all over the place twice in January. But now we’re still in January thaw, and on this beautiful early Saturday afternoon in southwestern Vermont, it is unbelievably 54 degrees and sunny.

But my foot does not care that all is right with the world and lets me know unequivocally I won’t be completing this four-mile or so circuit at a good clip, at least not the one I prefer. So Scout and I power on for about three miles, stopping here and there to investigate a noise, or some movement in the woods, real or imagined. I shift to toe running from time to time to answer my heel, now shouting at me. We wave at the mailman and a few other passersby. Then we turn up the long dirt road that will eventually lead us back to the road where we left the car.

This particular road has turned to soft mud, the kind you can get stuck in without proper tires on your car: you expect this in March, maybe not so much in January. I glance at Scout’s underside and realize it is black as the night, from his pads up to his armpits. I just bathed him last week, and that is too bad. But this doggy is on cloud nine, and so is his human, even if we’ve dropped back to nothing more than a vigorous walk at this point.

By the time we get back to the road where we left the car we’ve slipped in the mud a few times, been taunted by one especially portly squirrel, and got within sneezing distance of a large, white horse giving rides to little people at a local winter festival. We can smell the wood fire where s’mores are being made hand over fist, and we cross paths with countless folks and other dogs coming and going. And then we are back to the car, almost, it’s just ahead, but Scout has now planted three feet and is pointing with his wrist: the dog is stock still, trembling in his tracks.

What is it—what do you see? I ask him.

And then even I, the deficient human, can see it: an enormous gray squirrel, about eye level, peering at us from a space under a fallen tree. The squirrel flicks its tail a couple times, taunting us.

Scout trembles.

The squirrel disappears and reemerges now on top of the log, comically dangling a tiny, airline-size liquor bottle from its mouth.

Scout is beside himself.

The squirrel drops the bottle, which goes clinkety-clink-clink onto something hard on the ground. He vanishes and then reappears, holding the bottle again by its narrow mouth as if he were about to tip it back to lap up a last drop, before skittering up a tree and out of sight. Scout is breathless with excitement, panting, and my cheeks are tickled pink on either side of my wide grin, a grin of disbelief at this spectacle. I wonder whether David will even believe this story. My foot is screaming at me, but I am euphoric on this exquisite late January afternoon in Vermont.

Call me crazy, but this is why I run.