What I'm talking about here is an overuse injury, the kind that TV sportscasters describe by location (a "knee") and old-school coaches and inadequate health-insurance plans insist you ignore ("You gotta play hurt!").

  No doubt I have been spared this sort of thing for a half-century because my youthful forays into sport generally involved load-bearing activities; you know, stuff you can do in a pool, or maybe a poolroom, or even lying down.

  This is not to say such activities are entirely without risk. The captain of my high-school swim team once got drilled amidships by a diver during practice and was hauled unconscious from the water. Another teammate split open both heels on the wall during a poorly timed flip turn. And plenty of us barfed in the pool during early season speed workouts, which made the swimming a tad sticky, like doing 100-yard freestyle repeats in a vat of watery soup from the school cafeteria.

  As for poolrooms, they have been known to contain pool cues, which can be put to any number of appalling uses never intended by their designers, especially if the cue-wielder has discovered you lying down with someone he is unreasonably fond of, perhaps even married to. Happily, I was a Foosball player. The worst an irate Foosball player can do is chuck one of those little balls at you.

  Despite these and other hazards, I remained free of chronic injuries until I took up running, which has finally set me to stumping grumpily around podiatrists' offices like Long John Silver, with a distinct list to port. Give me a peg leg and a parrot and I'm a lock for a role in the next Johnny Depp pirate flick. Arrrr.

  Wrong Way. Moving to running from cycling is exactly back-asswards from how most people make the switch. Even Dubya managed to get it right, which makes it practically the dictionary definition of a "no-brainer."

  Frankly, were it not for cyclocross, which I discovered in the late 1980s, I never would have run a step. Not with empty hands, anyway. As a kid, I hated gym-class laps around the track the way Dick Cheney hates the living.

  But back in the days of Lyotard pedals and bar-end shifting, 'cross involved a good deal of running, just like larceny or adultery. And so rather than relearn this despicable practice every fall, I decided to run year-round, just enough to keep the Alzheimer's off my legs' muscle memory: "Eh? You want us to do what? Say, what kind of shoes are those? Help, help, police!"

  An added inducement was that running is useful when encountering critics of one's work, as some Danish newspapermen have recently discovered. As the late Richard Pryor noted in "Live In Concert": "You never can tell what will happen. You be out in the street and somebody could jump on you. Your legs got to be in shape in case you have to run. Run. If you can. If you can't run, fly."

  The Agony of De Feet. I never could fly. And now I can't run, not even if I catch fire. I can still ride, but if some literary critic jumps on me and there's no bicycle handy, I'm gonna be busing tables in Hell while Richard kills at the Lake O' Fire Improv.

  Three weeks after my injury left me unable to set foot to floor, my usual Monday-morning footwork involved a 30-minute walk, with quarter-inch cork lifts in the heels of both shoes pending the arrival of some exorbitantly priced orthotics that did to my Medical Savings Account what the White House wants to do to the entire health-care system.

  Once I warmed up and quit limping I felt the old urge to run, or at least jog. But the tendon murmured, "Oh, I wouldn't do that if I were you."

  Now it tells me.