Running for Your Life: More Pain Inc.

Enough with the public despair already. So unseemly. I haven’t bought my e-bus tickets yet, but I’m bound and determined to make it to Boston, come what may. Exactly three weeks today (March 28), I picture myself in the Boston Marathon April 18, 10:20 a.m. start, the White Wave by name, which brings to mind a line from “Ghostwritten,” the debut novel of ace novelist David Mitchell:

“Lunatics are writers whose works write them.”
*

Last week for the first time I can remember since my second blood clot in July 2001, I’ve not run a single step. For the record, not since Sunday, March 20, when I was damn sure I’d muscle-tore my way right out of eighteen months of prep-training, two marathons, Pittsburgh in May, and Scranton, Pa.’s Steamtown in October, a bear for M to live with, certain that there was no way in hell that I’d be thinking today, eight days later that I’d be planning in three weeks time to be running on this screwed-up leg. Sure that this too, who was I kidding, as Kafka said to Max Brod – and you really must check out “Who Owns Kafka?”, March 3, 2001, in the London Review of Books, I don’t know if this URL requires a subscription to read, but worth the effort to find it, if not, http://bit.ly/f9e7dB – “There is hope, but not for us,” remembering the Ides of March 2008, the year when I’d last trained for a marathon, twenty-one years after my previous one, when on February 12th, M wrenched her ankle badly on the ice at Prospect Park skating rink, only to return with me, and tumble down the top step of our brownstone home and pulverize her ankle bone so badly that for the better part of the next two months she was in a wheelchair, eight weeks of non-weight bearing, and for months I was for all intents and purposes a part-time nurse, and praising God often enough during that time that M is a terrifically strong woman, my wife, as her leg healed in such a way that even the surgeon couldn’t be more impressed, and finally I went back to marathon-dreaming, the next year a bust, but in May 2010, registered and ran Pittsburgh and in October, and this bears repeating, in three weeks, because I’m bloodyminded but also because I’ve been blessed by support from family and friends, and yeah this isn’t a one-way road, the final one hundred meters ahead of me, in Steamtown I can hardly believe it when I see my time, imagine my daughter cheering me on, when all is said and done, we runners at the finish line, one after another after another running for longer than three hours straight through tears and pain, cheered on across the miles by complete strangers, and if you haven’t experienced it, it’s hard to describe, my colleague and daughter-namesake K, hooked now after running the Manhattan Half this month through Times Square, before banner-waving tourists and family members aware of where she will be at the 11-mile mark thanks to the magic of technology, a chip that she wears, alone yet held in a way that merits the addiction, the getting hooked, because there is a lot to be said for the simple joys of the solitary pursuit of learning to listen to your body, the muscles, the joints, to know the difference between aches and mild pain the cusp of injury, kick myself still for not listening closely enough, how I wrote about feeling a muscle tighten akin to an overstrung drum – or guitar – just kept going despite the fact that it doesn’t loosen, soften, was crying out, telling you to listen, you’re at the edge of breaking, snap, snap, snap, three strings of a 12-string and dumb me thinking, okay, I’ll just play through. And not just this set. But the next and the next so that now, with Boston on the horizon, I sit on a sore inner thigh muscle, and getting sorer, aggressively strengthening and stretching for eight days but this morning a collosal backslide, wishing here at the coffee shop as I write that I had a heating pad to keep the swelling down, pissed off that I missed the step going down the basement Walgreens to pick up the Epsom Salts for tonight, for both after the PT session, and earlier, at 8 a.m., I put in my first cardio, Elliptical, still haven’t run, couldn’t begin to think that my right leg could stand the pounding of a mile run, much less a marathon, still I go 41 minutes, a reasonable tension, two-mile climb and 724 calories spent, a big sweat and no leg pain, then on to PT and deep is the muscle work but damn, I slip on the steps and now the butt is sore. Dead sore. My PT specialist today says she often treats runners in October who’ve injured themselves, some with limited mobility, at half-strength and in pain, “But you can’t tell them a thing,” she says. “They run no matter what I say,” then, I imagine her thinking, in the marathon itself they really tear up their muscles, and are in for subsequent costly treatment, months of it, just to get back to where they were in the summer. “That’s not how you see my condition, is it?” “No,” she says, “it’s not. But you have to work at it.”

Right. And now I have to get up and buy a little heating pad before going to work. Instead settle for Aleve and Tiger Balm pain relieving patches. I know I started this post with different intentions. But I have to face facts. When I pealed off the first of the Tiger Balm patches a band of muscle was not just tight, but as hard as a rock. I usually post on Tuesday, but today this is going up on Monday. Tomorrow, I'll have a strong sense of knowing where I will stand. Or if I can stand, for that matter.

Next: Running for Your Life: What’s Next?