Graduation Day.

I went to physical therapy 2-3 times a week for about 16 weeks.  That's about 40 hours spent with the same group of people at the same time of day, for the majority of days in a work week.  Patients recovered and left, new ones showed up - some with positive attitudes, others defeated.  Through it all there was the constant of the doors opening sleepily at 6:30AM, the smell of strong Dunkin' Doughnuts coffee, low lights until everyone was awake, balancing on a makeshift wake board until a stop watch said "enough" and the bliss of the hottest, largest heating pad you've ever seen being wrapped around an aching group of tendons as you sit back on your private padded table and watch CNN.  Clearly, there are worse places to be early on a Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday morning. 

My last day at physical therapy, Graduation Day, was actually a little bittersweet because of all of these constants and the people behind them. Walking out of the Rothman Institute that day felt like being shoved, without warning, into the cold (and the dark - January PM runs...) with only the promise that the pain would ease. I had workouts, winter clothes and better habits; but I didn't have my people.  The faces that never wavered and always reassured; the faces with the "just ten more seconds" and "you need to focus on your toes when you stretch"; the faces that would become the foundation for my recovery - in and out of physical therapy. 

Nine months later, on a random 4 mile run just before dawn, I ran by one of those people who made the constants of my recovery possible:  the heating pad girl.   She was an ever pleasant reminder that heating pads could unwind even the worst ills, that hard workouts were the only way out of this mess and that other people had it a lot worse.  Her positivity replaced my own in the early days and so the ability to finally smile back at her (and mean it) while sprinting up the hill by the one mile tree, pain free, was the biggest "thank you" of them all.