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Injured and giving in

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I like to consider myself a fairly smart person. I get good grades in school, have a decent amount of common sense, am up on my current events and read lots of journals and books.

HOWEVER. When it comes to running and injuries I am a complete idiot. With each smack of my feet on the pavement or bridle path, every ounce of common sense, lessons learned from past experience or information gathered from research just flies right out of my body. It’s like I get tunnel vision with a side of denial and stubbornness, and going for that run always sounded like a good idea at the time.

So here I am, less than 11 weeks out from my planned marathon, more than one month in from when I first started feeling hamstring pain and feeling pretty screwed. After resting the leg for the first part of last week, I decided to give it a go on the roads on Thursday. And then on Friday and Saturday too.

Not smart.

I haven’t given it enough time to heal, and every time it starts to feel ok, I try to run on it and the cycle just repeats itself. If this were happening to anyone else, I would not hesitate to be like: “Well, DUH! You need to take more time off and just chill the eff out.” But when it’s me, I am a grade A moron.

10 slow miles. not one of them felt good.

I do not have the answer as to why this is the case (does anyone else?? Please tell me I’m not alone), but something finally clicked yesterday during my failure of a 10 miler that was supposed to be 16. All through the run I worried when the leg would start hurting, and then when it did I worried if it was going to get worse, when I should stop and how crappy I’d feel. It wasn’t FUN.

CLICK. I run because it’s fun and I want to feel good. I don’t want to run in pain, and I sure as hell don’t want to run another marathon in pain. So I’m going to take at last a week off from running. I may swim, I may yoga or spin, I may do nothing, and I’m not going to think about the spring marathon that is more and more unlikely to happen.

Even though running and I are in a fight right now, my day revolved around it starting at 05:30 yesterday morning, when I was scheduled to volunteer at the NYC Half.

Kara Goucher in white compression socks

Not going to lie, I was cold, tired, and jealous of every single one of the 20,000 runners frolicking around the park, down through Times Square and the West Side Highway, and jubilantly ending their race at the South Street Seaport.

The men’s pack

I hate feeling sorry for myself when I’m injured, but consider it part of the healing process (if that makes any sense at all). It usually comes and goes for me, and by the time I headed to work after my volunteer shift, the crankypants attitude started to dissipate. Which was good, because the rest of my day pretty much involved talking about running, running shoes and fitting people for new shoes. It almost made me forget about my gimp leg and remember that I like running a whole lot. Hopefully it’ll forgive me for being such an ass and we’ll be together again soon.

Question: Are you smart when it comes to running injuries? Recognize when you need a break? Or are you like me?


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