I started running on March 17. It’s something that, curiously, I hadn’t done in years despite my having played collegiate lacrosse during my undergraduate years. I’d never thought of myself as being particularly out of shape — I was still an athlete, regardless of my dedication to my craft — but once I stopped playing, I started to pack on the pounds. I got back into the gym a few months after my final game, which was almost a year ago, but lifting weights didn’t do much to assuage my gut. Maybe it was my penchant for heavy beers and hefty hoagies. Or maybe it was a consequence of my outright refusal to address my cardiovascular fitness. It just wasn’t in the cards for me to give up the former, so I decided to focus on the latter.

I eased into it with painstaking graduality. For months, I’d hop on the treadmill before a workout for half a mile — maybe even a mile, if I was feeling up to it. But feeling up to it was a sensation I felt sporadically, and at times I’d go a week or more without stepping foot on the rubber belt that had come to symbolize a shortness of breath and an aching pain in my perpetually sore right ankle. But I persevered, and by the beginning of March I was getting through a mile comfortably, albeit at a leisurely pace, every day. I’d settled into a routine, one that was novel in the context of my usual level of physical activity.

On March 17, when the gyms closed, I had to adapt. Running outside, especially during the early spring near the New Jersey shore, where the temperature is apt to fluctuate between just above freezing and that of a temperate midsummer morning, is entirely different from plodding along on a flat, forgiving surface in a climate-controlled building. My first foray into the world of outdoor fitness went about as well as I could have expected. I drove to the boardwalk in Point Pleasant Beach — the promenade’s predictable footing made for an easy mile up, mile back route — and I realized that I was in considerably better shape than I’d initially thought.

I kept pushing myself. I stuck to my routine as best I could, running every day in an attempt to maintain some semblance of a fitness regimen. At first, two miles took me somewhere around 16 minutes. After a week, I was down to around 15 minutes. Then, as I was working my way toward 14 minutes — I still haven’t run a sub-seven minute mile since high school — New Jersey closed its boardwalks.

My scenic oceanside escapes from quarantine were supplanted by the eyesore-laden, suburban terrain of Brick-meets-Lakewood. My early morning runs, which had come to include a drive to the boardwalk, the run itself, a longing gaze at the beach, and a trip to a favorite local coffee shop, no longer ate up the two-or-so hours that served as my reprieve from the monotony of being stuck at home. They became just that — early morning runs.

I needed that time out of the house. It was literally and figuratively a breath of fresh air, a time where I could organize my thoughts and plot out the day’s work without the familiar din of network news and family members’ work-related phone calls clouding my head. So, like when the gyms closed, I adapted. I didn’t need to cut down my mile time. I needed to be able to run for longer.

Two brisk miles on the boardwalk turned into three comfortably-paced miles over uneven pavement and cracked sidewalks. I was still running every day and, to my surprise, my longer runs started to fly by with relative ease as I settled into yet another new routine. But as I became more comfortable with my increased mileage, I started to lose that euphoric feeling of post-run exhausted elation that can only be achieved by really pushing oneself. I craved this feeling. I’d come to need it so badly in my isolated state, in which my only real joy came as a consequence of the exhaustion induced by pushing the limits of my legs and lungs, that my only option was to embark on ever-longer and more physically taxing runs.

So I did. Four miles was tough, but still manageable. Not one to rest on my laurels, I went on one more four-mile run to make sure it wasn’t a fluke before deciding to move on to five, which a month prior was more of a pipe dream than a target distance, the next day. It was going great — I fell into a rhythm, my breathing and footfalls registering as a just-audible metronome above the music blaring from my headphones — until I reached my last mile. Then, having lost focus on the precarious footing of the half-grass, half-pavement shoulder of the four-lane road leading back to my neighborhood, I took one careless step and sprained my ankle.

A sprain is the stretching or tearing of a ligament, which connects bones to bones and keeps joints stable. A mild one, which mine was, takes approximately seven to ten days to heal, provided one takes care of it. Rest, ice, compress, and elevate. I know from experience that a sprained ankle, if improperly cared for, can get worse. There’s the potential for chronic pain and ongoing instability of the joint. But I’ve been conditioned — through a lifetime of participation in competitive sports and the philosophy ingrained in the collective mind of America that when the going gets tough, the tough get going — to ignore the symptoms of a sprain in the joint which bears the entirety of my bodyweight. Pain, limited movement, and bruising weren’t going to keep me from escaping my house-as-prison. By the time I limped my way through my front door, I had decided that I wasn’t going to stop running.

When I woke up the next morning, my ankle was a wreck. It was swollen, stiff and sore, but I discovered that if I kept my ankle locked as I walked, with my toes pointed upward, the pain wasn’t unbearable. So I pulled on a sweatshirt, laced up my sneakers, and headed out the door. I’d run a mile, I decided, just to test the waters. I broke into a slow trot to get a feel for how my ankle was responding. Sore, but still functional to the extent I needed it to be. I pushed the pain toward the back of my mind; it asserted itself as a dull pang, letting me know it was there but not forcing me to stop. I kept reminding myself to keep my ankle locked and my toe pointed up, but by the end of my run it didn’t matter. The entire lower half of my right leg ached.

As I sat down in my kitchen amidst the chattering of the logistics professional to my right and the droning of Joe Scarborough, Mike Brzezinski, and Willie Geist emanating from the television in the living room to my left, I came to a realization: I’d rendered myself immobile, for all intents and purposes, as a result of my refusal to let my ankle heal. In the process of altering my running form to accommodate my sprained ankle, I’d strained my Achilles tendon, which connects the muscles in the calf to the heel bone. Strains like this — to tendons that connect muscle to bone and enable movement — can take weeks to heal. I’d effectively tripled my recovery time because, rather than resting and recovering, I was chasing something that was, from a practical standpoint, unattainable.

Had I kept pushing myself — kept chasing that feeling, that runner’s high — I could’ve torn something and stretched my weeks-long recovery time out over months. The lack of stability in my ankle combined with my inability to effectuate movement in my lower leg would have undoubtedly led to something more severe, like a ruptured Achilles. But I listened to my body, and now I’m healing. I’m dealing with the loss of my coping mechanism as best I can, but I find solace in my knowledge that my inability to run, to escape, isn’t permanent. It’s only a matter of time before I can hit the road again.

The same is true for the body politic. As we walk, at this curious moment in time, on untrodden ground, it’s plain to see that our essential personnel — particularly those working in health-and-community services — are the connective tissue that stabilize and facilitate movement within and between the industries and services, the muscle and bone, that give shape to critical infrastructure. With our healthcare system, for example, completely overwhelmed by COVID-19, the people who work tirelessly to keep this essential service up and running are under previously-unseen pressure to bear the undue weight of responsibility for the national well-being. The ligaments are sprained. The tendons are strained.

This makes the rush to return to normalcy, whatever that comes to mean in the coming months and years, especially troubling. And it makes last weekend’s lockdown protests, a precursor to some red states reopening their economies this week, seem short-sighted and even dangerous. People are desperate for an escape — to return to the old normal, to be out in public at gyms, movie theaters, restaurants, bars, even boardwalks — and they’re running out of ways to cope with the isolation foisted on them by national and local governments. But to push the limits of the ligaments and tendons is to risk permanent, debilitating injury to the joints — to the industries, services, and people upon which we depend.

We need to accept that injuries take time to heal, and to be in a hurry to resume life as it was is to show wanton disregard for the long-term health of the body. We need to rest, to recover, to rehabilitate. Then, we take it a mile at a time. Our focus should be incremental. Regardless of mixed messages from national and local government, it is the responsibility of the brain to govern the body — not to serve individual ligaments, tendons, and muscles, but to ensure the longevity of the whole.