Edging My Bet
Holding onto the dasher board of the rink’s doorway, momentarily frozen, I step carefully onto the ice. And I don’t fall. Victory.
This moment had always been a favorite when I played hockey, coached, or even just went for a skate. Leaving the realm where one’s full-time focus is on not slipping, not sliding, you stride off the rubber mat, blade meeting ice, finding purchase, the biting sound of the edge, and the blissful glide across the fresh sheet. This had always been joyful, a warm recognition, a solitary homecoming.
It’s not like that today.
I’m frail and fearful. Bambi on ice.
Today is my first attempt to skate after surgery to reattach my patellar tendon. It’s been nine months and my knee should be stronger than this. Babies are made in nine months, whole humans! All I’m asking for is a simple rope-and-pulley mechanism. Seems a sensible ask.
No matter how many times and in what way I phrase the question – to the surgeon, the PT, the ChatGPT – the answer comes back the same: Six to twelve months. I’m smack in the middle of that range, outcome still unknown. Seems more a sentence than a diagnosis.
Purgatory could be worse than hell. At least in hell you know what you’re in for: an eternity of suffering. Abandon all hope ye who enter here. But purgatory? Where marginal souls suck up painful penance to cure twisted affections? Where there’s hope for ascension, there’s constant angst. Flames or angels? This could go either way. Father Dwyer would be proud that these remnants of an Irish Catholic worldview persist, six decades in.
But don’t get smug, Father. Life is purgatory. No one needs a man in a pulpit to get that one straight.
I totter across the ice, my injured leg making little, tentative pushes. Standing on my right leg, the uninjured one, I steer toward the bench. A hand on the door, I step gingerly in and sit. I’ve skated all of seventy feet.
Get up and get going.
I do. Stepping on the ice, forcing the stride and glide. My head knows what to do, my brain sends commands, only to have them repelled by an imaginary Maginot line, somewhere below my midsection. My quad quivers. Knee wobbles. This may be a big mistake.
A pale woman with a long braid glides quickly by, twirling effortlessly, eyes raised to the heavens, flowing to some stirring melody only she can hear. I swing wide, almost to the boards, to avoid her theatrical arc.
Show off.
Okay, pick it up, blue line to blue line, I say to myself. A warm-up drill from the beginning of a hundred pee wee hockey practices. It takes seven strides to cover the distance. It should take three. But my strides are powerless and painful. One of the most perplexing things about recovering from injury is not knowing how much pain you should push through, and what level is meant to back you off.
Above the glass, on the level of the free weights and cardio contraptions, a trainer I know is working with an old man wearing a Champion T-shirt and shorts from Walmart that look like what we’d call gym shorts back in junior high. Hokas and white tube socks. Bless his heart.
The guy is probably my age.
The thought gives me pause, sucks at my confidence.
I slow down and sink into a semi-squat. Gliding, pushing off edges without picking up my feet, I circle the sheet in a drill we used to call blades on the ice.
Confidence is not created out of whole cloth. It’s an evidence-based byproduct, born of doing hard things. Sometimes we succeed, and sometimes we don't, but when it comes to building confidence, it may not matter. The fact that you attempt to do something that scares you, and survive mostly intact, sews a little resilience merit badge on the sash of your subconscious. The thing is that the merit badges have short shelf lives; you have to keep doing hard things if you want to maintain confidence. At least that’s how it’s been for me.
I make another lap and then sit to let the pain drain away and perform a mental inventory to ascertain whether I’ve damaged the knee. If the pain ebbs, it’s not damaged. If it persists, we’ve got a problem.
The pain fades to discomfort, which is good news and bad. I haven’t damaged myself, but now I must go again. Looking at hockey time clock, ticking time away below the University of Utah Hockey banner, I make a goal. Skate for four minutes, four times the average hockey shift, and then you can sit again.
I do two more shifts, suffering audibly, before calling it quits. As I head for the gate, I notice the trainer nodding down to me with a look that’s either pity or recognition of the struggle. Or maybe I’m just projecting, because I’m feeling both. I’m not sure whether I will ever get back to full-speed hockey skating—three knee surgeries in six months are not an ideal recipe—but I do know how to find out: just keep trying.