Finishing up my warmup, just before my workout last Wednesday, which didn’t feel good and started the ball rolling on trying to start feeling better.
Before I start, let me assure the three or four of you how read this (but more so I’m trying to assure myself), I’m not yet completely freaking out (don’t freak out, Scootah, everything is going to be all right in the end).
That being said, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t in my own head a little bit right now. That hiccup I wrote about last week – a strained hip flexor which is causing some other issues in my right leg – has kept me running from since I aborted my run 5 miles in on Sunday. I had a few OK runs before that, but mostly, running did not feel good for more than a week before that jog Sunday morning.
I say I’m not freaking out, because, like I said last time, I have more than 15 weeks left until the Chicago Marathon and I had four pretty good months of build up until I had to shut it down. I was in a pretty good spot before getting injured and I will have time to build off that once I’m healthy and able to start training (that comes after I’m able to start running) again.
But I’m in my head a little bit because I’m little disappointed in myself. I wrote a while back about how I almost gave up on the marathon after Sugarloaf. I decided not give up on that distance because I didn’t want Sugarloaf to be my lasting memory of the marathon.
If you asked me, however, why it was so important for me to run another marathon, the most honest answer I could give is that I want to prove to myself I can do all the necessary work to get ready for a marathon.
The Chicago will be my fourth marathon and the fifth I have “trained” for. I put trained in quotation marks because I didn’t really train for my first. I trained for a half marathon, then did one 3-hour long run after the half and called it good (I ran 4:47 for a reason). I made it through training for Chicago 2014 just fine, though I only trained for that race for like 13 weeks and I took a break to move to Portland. I planned to run the Maine Marathon in 2015, but jacked up my hamstring and my adductor (which is part of my problem right now), and had to bag it. I made it through training for Maine in 2016 just fine and ran my best marathon to date. The build for Sugarloaf was going better than I could have hoped until I re-aggravated that adductor/hamstring. I spent a few weeks riding the exercise bike, still tried to run the race I was originally training to run, and fell flat on my face.
You see a trend there? Yeah, me too. Two of three marathon builds before this one, I wound up injured and either bagged the race or drove the struggle-buss for 10-plus miles.
Both times I got injured because I did something dumb to get injured (a faster-than 5K workout in the middle of a 9-mile run, for example) and didn’t do enough of the other work (which is also dumb) to stay healthy. My goal this time around was to avoid being stupid and do all the hard work necessary to make it to the finish line healthy, strong, and ready to kick the shit out of 26.2 miles. I’m not saying I can’t make it to the starting line on Oct. 13 healthy and ready to kick ass, but I’m clearly injured right now and that is the result of doing something dumb (trying to jump to a stand doing pushups is how I believe I injured my hip flexor) and not doing enough stretching, rolling and strength work to keep my body in one piece.
Thursday morning I spent an hour at the gym doing all the stuff I don’t do enough and end up injured.
There is a chance for redemption here. My race isn’t so close that I’ll run out of time to get healthy. I should have enough time to get over this pain, get back on the roads, and train enough to run a decent marathon.
It’s also a kick in the ass to do the stuff I always say I’m going to do and never do. Right now, I can’t really do anything else and I’m paying to go to physical therapy, which should be motivation enough to STOP FUCKING SLACKING.
So, I’ll try to keep the freaking out to a minimum. I’ll try to get out of my head and stop beating myself up. I can’t fix what I’ve already done, I can only try to be better moving forward.
I still have time to prove to myself I can do the work to run a decent marathon, so it’s time to stop dwelling on the dumb stuff, be smarter, and do the damn work.
Run With Scootah 