The Boston Marathon

Today is about life, not DIY. I debated whether to do it, but I thought it might be cathartic for me so I decided to take the plunge — plus I did a whole lot of DIY posting last week, so I figured this was fair game. Feel free to skip if you’d prefer, and I’ll be back on Friday with more about the kitchen renovation. Spoiler alert: this happened.

Today I had originally planned a post about the Boston Marathon. We plan our post schedule out months in advance, and running the marathon has been on my calendar since last June so I figured I would be writing about how it went and maybe sharing some photos. But as I mentioned a few weeks ago, things did not go according to plan, and unfortunately I had to give up the marathon due to injury. It’s been a difficult 5 weeks since the injury, thinking non-stop about my leg and the marathon and what might happen. While it didn’t turn out in my favor, I feel a tremendous sense of relief now that the day has come and gone. I think humans have a tremendous capacity to deal with disappointment, but uncertainty can be much harder to grapple with. (Although yesterday I discovered that this year’s race jackets were turquoise, so I’m pretty crushed that I missed out on one!)

For those who want the full story about what happened, here it is. I’ve essentially been training since last May, keeping an average long run of 8-10 miles per week until December when I ramped up for official training. I was feeling great, and my speed was exactly what I hoped for — for my 20-mile run, I averaged a pace of 8:13/mile, which I thought could translate to a race pace of 8:00/mile and put me on track to run a 3:30 marathon (which would be a major PR for me).

Unfortunately, that’s when it all fell apart. I had been feeling some pain in my right shin for a few weeks, but it was on and off and wasn’t bothering me on long runs. I feel stupid now for ignoring it, because it’s the same pain that became really bad after a race in 2014 and forced me to take 9 weeks off of running.

But I just didn’t take it seriously because it wasn’t interfering with my ability to run, run fast, or run far. The afternoon of my 20-mile run, I came home, cleaned the house, and sat down to watch a movie. Sam was out of town. When I got up from the couch two hours later, my right shin hurt so much that I couldn’t put weight on it. I went to bed hoping for the best, but the pain was still excruciating the next day and I had to abort my attempt to get to work. I’m still feeling some pain five weeks later even just walking, and running hasn’t been possible.

I’m seeing a sports chiropractor, and together we’re trying to diagnose the issue while I do a lot of stretching and physical therapy. It’s likely nerve pain that might stem from tight/weak glutes and hip flexors, or perhaps an ankle mobility issue, or maybe both or neither. I’d never been to a chiropractor before, and man is it tough! I’ve been going twice a week, and my legs are constantly covered in bruises. Yesterday I even tried something called “dry needling” with her, which is like acupuncture except they put the needles in much deeper to hit the muscle and the goal is to cause muscle twitches. The aftermath is that my leg is unbelievably sore for the next few days, but it should help a lot once the initial soreness fades.

The clear lesson is that stretching and strength training are a crucial part of any running program to help prevent injury — as strong as parts of your legs can be from running, supporting muscles can still be very weak and the impact as the miles get longer is very taxing. And I am terrible at both stretching and strength training. When I am forcing myself to run after work in the dark and cold day after day, I totally wimp out when it comes to doing one iota of additional work. My body just couldn’t take what I was asking it to do, which was endure enormous amounts of stress without the support structures to go along with it.

Though it was clearly necessary, it was very hard to give up the idea of the marathon. Training for a marathon is a big sacrifice, and to will yourself to go out for run after run (even in a mild winter) requires convincing yourself how badly you want that race — how important it is compared to other things in your life that you choose to give up. By the time it’s just 5 weeks away, there’s only one long run left and the rest is just tapering. And so to have that goal go from right within your grasp to gone in a matter of hours is a hard blow. That’s especially true for the Boston Marathon, which is not easy to get into. This year I was registered as part of a charity team, so I raised $7,500 in order to run. My friends and family were incredibly generous, but it was a challenge and I definitely won’t be able to fundraise again anytime soon.

That means the only way to run Boston in the future is to qualify, which is no easy feat. It means running another marathon faster than I’ve ever run one before, and the qualifying timeline is difficult. To run Boston 2017 I would need to qualify at another marathon by August of this year, which basically means this spring (because summer races are too hot to make good qualifiers), and obviously that’s not happening given my injury. That means the soonest I could qualify to run Boston is 2018, which is a long time from now and would require shuffling around a lot of running and life plans. Like, the big kind of life plans that leave you with a really weird assortment of google search tabs open on your computer.

Update: It’s come to my attention that the above photo could be misunderstood to mean that there are imminent changes to our family size. That is not the case! I just meant that settling on a plan to run a marathon in 2018 or beyond could require reassessing life plans — that’s two years from now, and having just hit age 30 I’m plenty conscious of the fact that committing to time consuming and physically demanding hobbies for untold years into the future probably isn’t realistic.

But that’s what happens in life — things don’t go according to plan. I know that, and I know there are far greater injustices in the world than this one. That doesn’t mean I haven’t been totally crushed by this, and it’s been especially hard to cope with the stress and anxiety without the ability to run, which is what I usually do to cope with stress and anxiety. But I’ve had an amazing support network and I know that I’ll heal and return to running at some point. When, I don’t know. But all I can do is take it one day at a time, put in the work to heal, and focus on the many other things in my life that I love.