Ain't So Tough, Tough, Tough

When I was little, I used to want a broken arm. I didn't want to break my arm. I wanted it to be all of a sudden broken, without pain, so that I could look tough and have a cast that my friends could sign and oooh and ahhh over.

I thought I had gotten over this. I haven't.

Last weekend, as you may remember, Tiffany and I ran this race called the Tough Mudder. I wasn't nervous until a few days before.

I began to picture the myriad ways I might injure myself: I could drown in the ice-filled water, for god's sake; or scalp myself as I crawled under the barbed wire; or trip and be crushed under the weight of the log I was supposed to carry down the mountain.

Actually, what happened was, I got a splinter.

No, I'm serious.

I hurt my hand too--the man who hauled me over one of the walls on the obstacle course crushed my metacarpals in the process. But that injury was invisible.

Tiffany, on the uninjured hand, fell and scraped all the skin off one of her forearms. It looked so tough. And, apparently it hurt a lot too.

"Careful!" she warned me, any time I approached that part of her body. "It hurts a lot."

"I bet," I said sympathetically. "My hand hurts too. You can't see it, but it really hurts."

Everywhere we went after the race, people noticed Tiffany's scabbed-over arm.

"Wow, did you get that in the race?"

"Yeah."

"And did you run the race too, Rebecca?"

By that time, I had already taken the splinter out of my finger (which really hurt!), and there was no point in holding my invisibly-bruised hand out for them to see.

Like a good partner, Tiffany ooohed and ahhhed over my invisible injury the same way I did over her visible one. She took my hand and turned it over, held it under various lights and ran her fingers over the still-functioning veins. When we got home, after she poured hydrogen peroxide over her arm, she gave me a bag of frozen peas for my hand.

And then we sat on the couch and talked about how tough we were.