IGOR THE TERRIBLE
“Bear on Brooklyn Bridge,” Dall-E-2 (2022)
During the first Spring of my blossoming affair with running, I developed Iliotibial Tract Syndrome (ITBS). Sounds exciting, but its just a common knee injury, a classic for rookies. My orthopedics specialist prescribed a break from running, ice, ibuprofen, and physiotherapy. His talented therapist Igor, would get me back on track.
Igor was stocky, muscular, and, judging by his nose and body language, a boxer. Watching me trotting on the treadmill, he took notes in Cyrillic characters, stone-faced. I praised Russian literature. He gave me a tired smile.
“Lie face down now,” he said.
Prone on his workbench, Igor subjected me to structural analysis by contorting my body and testing muscle resistance.
“You’re weak. Too weak for long miles,” he said, stating the obvious and went on to demonstrate with the surprising ease of a dancer a series of isometric exercises, which I was to perform every day at home.
I said there was little chance for me to stick to this regime; I was undisciplined.
“Long-distance running is discipline,” he said, irritated, and dug his fingers into my thigh, humming an eerily familiar tune.
After a brief discomfort, the deep-tissue massage proved relaxing. I now understood what the orthopedist meant by talented.
When I left, Igor reminded me to resist the urge to run but to do the exercises religiously. They mainly targeted my core and hips when it was my knee that hurt, so I was skeptical. Plus, since his massage, the pain had disappeared, so I went for a quick secret run in the evening. I lasted precisely one day with my gymnastic routine.
Two weeks later, I lay again on Igor’s bench; this time, my hip was on fire. He instantly knew that I hadn’t done my homework. The problem had moved, spread out.
“Your body is a complicated network of tendons, bones, and muscles.” He traced various muscles from my skin, through the hips, to the knees and shinbone. “They have to work together. As soon as there’s a weakness, your body will try to compensate. Look at your hand.” He pinched one of my toes, and my ring finger flinched.
“Any small crisis in an area under the radar can throw the entire musculoskeletal system out of whack. This has serious consequences for the entire structure.”
He threw a screwdriver into a paper bag and shook it. The bag tore open.
“You need a better muscular corset to stabilize your bone sack if you want to continue jumping around.” He placed the tool in a rubber glove which remained unaffected by the motion.
“What’s a short easy distance for you?”
Three miles, I said.
“What’s the route?”
“Brooklyn Bridge and back.”
He traced my lacking muscles along my hurting bones and shook his head.
“With every step, your knee joints withstand three and half times your body weight. How much do you weigh?”
Roughly 130 lb.
“Multiply that by 3.5 equals 455. That's about the weight of seven German shepherds. Or a whole Brown Bear. For one single step! You take about 7 thousand steps to cover three miles.”
That equaled 49,000 brown bears. I was baffled.
“No, dummy! That makes 49,000 German Shepherds or 7,000 brown bears.” Igor rotated my leg in my hip. “You carry 7,000 of those beasts over the Brooklyn Bridge and back.”
As I imagined myself trying to drag a single bear across the Brooklyn Bridge, Igor surprised me with a sudden deep dip of his thumb next to my buttock all the way to the hip joint. The move clearly violated the Geneva Conventions. I gasped, dizzy.
“Sorry,” he said when he loosened his grip. “There was something that had to be loosened. An imbalance.”
I don’t know if I have to thank Igor’s torturous grip or the bear analogy, but I’ve been doing the boring exercises religiously since then. Sometimes I hum his familiar tune. I could swear it was Moscow Nights.
March 2022
