I’d like to think that after what happened to me earlier this year that I’ve learned my lesson. In March, only a month before my first Boston Marathon, I’m laid up with the Mother-Of-All torn hamstrings. The rip’s the size of a quarter just south of the right butt-bone. Today, a half-year later and I feel only the faintest of tugs back there; my range of motion as normal as it’s ever been.
Since then, getting back on my feet and on the road in June (a year after Thurb! came into our lives), I’ve been pretty much pain-free – outside of a sizzlingly hot July day on Fire Island when after about a nine-miler the forefoot pain returned, like what I suffered at the 10-10-10 Steamtown Marathon. But months later even that pain has eased and not because I have done anything different. Rather, I’m just staying to a steady pre-marathon training regimen, running a 1:05 with Thurb and without, depending more on his schedule than mine. (We both need to run, to shake out the cobwebs; I wouldn’t be keeping this blog, prepping a book proposal, preparing for travel, if I didn’t keep up with my running. Mind and body in sync. Keeping age at bay. At this point, almost effortlessly. What I see every morning in the hound. He’s raring to go. Start the day. Get up and run. Anything’s possible. Show me.)
The next day I’m cross-training, with weights and the elliptical machine, working hard on all, ending with a hard-push through on the elliptical. Increasing degrees of difficulty until, it doesn’t happen every time but on my birthday (Oct. 5) it does: hundred calories killed for every five minutes of exercise. On this day thirty minutes and I punch the PAUSE/END, and the calorie counter clicks over 600. I’m wide-eyed and without the pounding of packed earth and pavement pain-free. Not an ache anywhere.
The next week, though, the old stickler is back: shin splints. My bad leg – the clotting one, now over-muscled after thirty five years of running – is fine, but the right one isn’t. After a 1:05 run, it aches. I would’ve liked to have iced it a little more before having to go to an appointment before work. Instead it aches, not like hell, more like a dull throb. I noose my elastic-mediband around it which takes the worst of the pain pressure off but I still feel it as I run, even in the stretch therapeutic tights I bought to try to tough out what I thought last February was a leg cramp but what was a mild hamstring pull that only worsened the more I kept trying to train my way through the pain, wearing the souped-up hosiery, fuhgeddaboudit. What I needed was forty hours a week for a month on a zero gravity treadmill, then for the Boston Marathon 2011 itself, Mercury’s wings that would keep me just above the surface of the racecourse for the whole 26.2 miles. That being the only way in hell I would’ve been able to finish.
But live and learn, as that wicked torn hamstring had me nearly blacking out in pain. That’ll teach me to keep running on it despite the pain, the warning signs that I ignored at my peril, and Lord knows I won’t do that again. (Or I hope I won’t.)
Ice helps. In fact later (Oct. 10) I’m pain-free again. I’ve taken to using the mediband over the spot where the shin splints were acting up. And, as a safeguard against injury, am factoring in time at the end of each run, 1:05 or shorter, it doesn’t matter, of stretching for ten minutes and icing both shins. At this point I know my body. What parts need more care and attention than others. And I’m not going to just blindly assume that those parts will correct themselves, especially by December, when I’m planning to ramp up my miles and cross-training in order to be ready for Boston.
That goes for my forefoot pain too. I’ve been talking to Todd at Park Slope’s JackRabbit Sports. Before buying new shoes to address the problem, Todd, the store manager, recommended that I see an orthopedist to look into the possibility that I may have a small stress fracture in my left foot. I’ll do that within the next month so that by December I’ll be in doctor’s care and hopefully in the right shoes that will take me on the final leg of this lifelong journey. To Boston. In April. Here I come!
Next: Running for Your Life: A Week’s Pause
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