Ugly Feet

The other morning, while trotting around the Lake Overstreet loop, I caught my toe on a root and went down, banging my knee. This isn't unusual, and happens regularly enough to be embarrassing, especially because it was already light enough out to actually see the root. But this was a knee that has given me some trouble over the years--a missed 1977 cross-country season due to bursitis, a missed 1978 track season due to bursitis, and a lot of pain in the early twenty-first century culminating in a partial menisectomy. Bouncing back up from the road, I wondered if the knee deserved the thumping it had just gotten. I remembered a passage from a Mike Royko column:

I don't even take it personally when someone steps on my foot any more. I just say: "Don't apologize, he had it coming. Step on the other one, too, he's just as bad."

Royko had what might have been a love-hate relationship with his feet, except that there was absolutely no love involved. His feet were flat, or at least flat enough to cause pain while not flat enough to prevent him from serving in Korea. He relished describing how ugly his feet were:

My father had size twelve feet. And so did I--on the day I was born. And the doctor later said that I was the only infant he had ever seen come into the world with calluses and corns and cracked toenails. My toes are longer than most people's fingers. If the toes were extended, I'd probably wear a size twenty shoe. But they curl under about three times so they look more like large clenched fists than feet. They're also very wide. They might be as wide as they are long, which has always made it difficult for me to find shoes that fit properly.

Which is not all that Royko had to say about his feet, but some of the rest of it sounds like it might have been slightly exaggerated.

Royko's ugly feet were apparently congenital. One can acquire ugly feet during one's life, though, as did one of the characters in Brooke McEldowney's syndicated comic strip, 9 Chickweed Lane:

Marathon runners may not be subjecting their feet to the same forces that ballet dancers do, but the runner does it over and over and over again. I don't do marathon training anymore, but even with the modest amounts of running that I do nowadays, it's a rare occasion when I have all my toenails, when I don't have blisters in some stage of healing, when I don't have a build-up of callous that only a jack-plane could trim. I generally keep them locked up inside shoes, so their usual color is a corpse-like white--at the beach, they burn in seconds.


I also seem to have some of the bad genetics that Royko complained of, possibly from the same Chicago-Polish roots. But I didn't know that I had bunions until a podiatrist remarked, "When you're done with running, we can operate on those." Well, when I'm done running, you can pickle them. I'll be done with my feet and the rest of the flesh.

But however bizarre my asymmetric bunions look, they've never given me any pain. In general, my feet haven't been much of a problem for my running. They've been so blistered at times that almost the entire sole of the foot has sloughed off, but most of that must have been callous, because I could always run a day or two later. Plantar fascitis? Not me. These have been good feet, and I bear them no ill will.

Those knees, however, had better watch it.