Running for Your Life: Lost Track

Injury. Sharp pain in the fat of my inner thigh. Pushing myself to where I thought I needed to be with less than a month to go until Boston, and now this. Now if Boston is going to happen, I’ll need some help.
Definitely not running this week. Yesterday (March 19) I did an elliptical session and it went well, no complications of pain. What is the value of talking about our own pain for others? Suffice to say that I can’t rink this condition whatever it is, am not at a place where I can rest it, but yet this is something that only rest will yield what it needs, to heal so that I can do and continue to do, what this is really all about anyway, strip away the hubris, the counting: both of miles and strides and calories per hour – the highlighted readouts on the elliptical, which doesn’t do much for hammies, more for the quadriceps, mine now plenty strong, perhaps overstrong, which the Web says, will lead to a sprain of the right-leg hammy, which is tender under me as I write this down, less than four weeks from Boston, and until I hear from a doctor (March 22), I’m going to assume that this year won’t happen, Boston 2011; I’m still qualified for Boston 2012, and I’ll train a lot smarter for that, puts me in line for another year of blogs too. Here, will tap memory and experience, road food for the mind, but more of the practical, as M says, our bodies are less indestructible as we age. When we’re young, we’re fierce, free to be our own superheroes, now, with this injury, the one that didn’t go away, never had a chance to heal in February, and I have to face facts: Boston is a twenty-six-mile course, I will be on my own, busing there and busing back. I cannot afford to land in hospital, barely sixty percent finish, and I have completed now three out of five marathons, the ones that I didn’t I was injured, the first with shin splints, when I was experiencing terrible pain beyond ten miles, the second when I was not in top shape, crashed a the wall, twenty miles. There is no glory in injury, in following a path to certain injury, one that could play a role in a decision to stop running, to stop this course that I’m on, my heart beating like I’m on a twenty-miler, this is my toughest challenge, because I suspect as soon as I make that appointment with the doctor that Boston, the Boston Marathon dream for April, is gone. No doctor or physical therapist will advise me to continue training in this state, much less run twenty-six miles on a sore hammy. No matter how many pills, or surgical wraps, if I were to stop now, let it heal, with warmth and compresses and massage and acupuncture, fill in with anti-inflammatories, but no, better to forget it. What I say after the first month of league play has eliminated from contention my current favorite baseball team, the Pittsburgh Pirates: There is always next year.

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Here’s what happened: I stopped listening to myself, trusting the voice that I had in the beginning of this blog. The one that has defined my life to this point. Ego gets in the way of Zen, that every other day plan that had until these past few months, held sway, thirty-five years the dominant voice, now like Icarus, I’m flying too close to the sun, and thankfully I am not so injured that I will today abandon my plans to run next month in Boston, but I see it clearly, through M’s help because we talked about it at length this morning (March 21), if I allow myself to be self-critical, to be truthful as I re-examine these posts, more than sixty of them since I began this trek after the Pittsburgh Marathon, that I’ve lost track of who I am. I’ve for months now been counting the miles, not the minutes, in the beginning content to know that I was running, which was enough, not how fast, or how far, but that I was a peace in my pace, allowing other parts of myself room to breath. Near-obsessed with my times, my standing in my age group, at 55, not just a runner but an elite-quality marathoner, who’s to say that 33:33:08 will be my fastest time, perhaps if I just push myself a little harder, not rest when my body is telling me to do so, go out and push through the soreness, the pain, because what’s eight minutes in 26.2 miles, just 14 seconds a mile, doable, imagine a 3:25 Boston at my age, with that an automatic entry to my first New York City Marathon, in 2012, at that time, a 57-year-old man, eight years from retirement age, and I’m running faster than I ever have in my life. .¤.¤. Icarus flying directly into the sun, if only like the David Foster Wallace story in The New Yorker http://nyr.kr/eETeNN  I were so limber as that boy fated to press his lips to every part of his body and I could kick myself in the ass I would do it, kick myself with my bad leg, the blood-clotted one that is not injured, a thoroughly painful one before I go back to writing this down, and with a heavy heart plan my next three weeks of care and healing, doctor’s visits, PT, acupuncture, gentle-stretching, cross-training on a spaghetti-gear stationary bike, join the gym, get help on the hamstring-curl machine, then and only then will I know if I should go through with Boston. If it means there’s a strong chance I will injure the hammy badly during the race, or even rupture it so that a week after Boston I won’t be able to run like I always have, I won’t do it. It could be this was the message all along. You’ve lost track, Larry. Time to heal. And, yeah, run for your life.

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I’d like to think I’ll bounce back with my next post soon. But I don’t know. I’m pretty bummed. I’m thinking a little break will do me good. I’m in uncharted territory. And that doesn’t feel so good. It doesn’t feel good at all.