When she was in high school, Kirkland, Wa. triathlete Christie McMahon twisted her ankle hard enough to feel something go crunch. At the time, she was afraid she'd broken a bone. But the X-rays came back negative and the problem was diagnosed as "just a sprain."

Being a teenager and not knowing better, she went back to running. In the next 15 years, she had a great deal of success, including three successive trips to the USA Triathlon World Championships. But when approached for an interview, that's not what she most wants to talk about. Having recently had one surgery to correct damage done all those years ago and facing another, she's much more interested in making sure everyone knows that the words "just" and "sprain" should never be used in conjunction.

McMahon's athletic career didn't initially involve running. As a child, her life revolved around swimming.

"I started at age 5," she says.

Swimming wasn't all she did. She also played soccer and in seventh grade went out for track. The next year, though, she qualified for the Junior Olympics as a swimmer and was all set to focus solely on the one sport.

But the track coach wasn't to be denied.

"She came into my Spanish class one day and asked why I wasn't coming out for track," says McMahon.

The gambit worked. By her senior year of high school in Englewood, Colo., McMahon was doing the 4 x 400 relay and, when pressed, the mile. But her best event was the 800, at which she scored an impressive PR, "somewhere around 2:20," she says.

It says something about the degree to which McMahon subsequently shifted to longer events that she can't remember the number precisely. Still, years later, she can run away from just about any of her training partners at short distances on the track.

McMahon has had only two sprains: the one in high school and another in 2004. But in combination, they seem to have blown a hole in a vital bit of cartilage, and the jury is still out on whether surgery can repair it.

She's only 34, an age at which many marathoners and triathletes haven't even peaked.

"An ankle sprain seems like such an insignificant injury in the grand scheme of things," she says. "I never thought it could be career-ending."

Normally, ankle sprains involve tendon or ligament tears - tissues that, even if they don't heal, are fairly easy to fix surgically. But it's also possible to damage articular cartilage, the smooth lining that allows bones to rub against each other without painful friction.

"Broken bones will heal, and tendons and ligaments can all be repaired; but your articular cartilage is one of those things your body can't repair," she says.

McMahon speaks not just with the wisdom of experience. In college, she majored in exercise physiology and now consults with orthopedists using surgical implants manufactured by a division of medical giant Johnson & Johnson. In retrospect, she believes the crunch she felt with the initial sprain came from a small section of cartilage being crumpled up, a bit like a discarded tissue paper. It's not something that would have shown on an X-ray and not the type of thing an emergency-room doctor would have been looking for. Nor did it cause her problems for more than a dozen years.

Then in 2004 while training for a marathon, she twisted the ankle again six miles into a 20-mile trail run.

"It hurt, but my brain said I had to do 20 miles," recalls McMahon. So she finished the run. She also completed the marathon, plus another the following year and one the year after that. But last year while training for her sixth marathon, the 2007 Marine Corps Marathon, the ankle started to hurt again.

McMahon's interest in longer races began her senior year in college at the University of Kansas in 1995. Busy with classes, she had given up serious swimming and had not run competitively since high school. But as graduation loomed, the burgeoning sport of triathlon caught her interest.
She was already good at two of the sports, "so I borrowed my brother's bicycle," McMahon recalls.
That same year, she entered the Lawrence Memorial Hospital Triathlon, a sprint-distance race. The result was a third-place in her age division (20-24 age group) - enough to encourage her to hire a former University of Kansas assistant track coach to help with her training. Within two years, she had qualified for the 1997 USA Triathlon National Age Group Championship in Columbia, Md. But she almost didn't go.

"I didn't have any expectations," she says.

The good thing about not having expectations is that all surprises are good ones. In her case, she finished ninth in her age group, qualifying for the 1997 World Championships, held that year in Perth, Australia.

She returned to the Nationals in 1998 and again in 1999, rising as high as fourth in her division and going to Lausanne, Switzerland, and Montreal, Canada, for two more successive Worlds.
Her favorite was Australia in 1997, because it was first.

"The Worlds is like a miniature Olympics," she says. "They do a parade of the nations. There's a designated holder of your flag and a lot of ceremonies. It was a unique experience."

So was the race, which was held in a saltwater river that was home to a species of stingless jellyfish.

"I remember it being very cold," she says. "My feet didn't thaw out until about halfway through the run."