Ten Good and Bad Things About Not Being Able to Run

This weekend I was supposed to be racing a half-marathon. I paid for it back in January. That race will mark my second Did Not Start (DNS) ever, and it will be swiftly followed by a 15K DNS on April 28. My first DNS was a 10-mile race I signed up for in 2006. My excuse then was that I had just found out I was pregnant with twins--I wasn't sad about missing that one.

Because I AM sad about missing these two races, I thought I'd better do some hard-core non-Terzah-like seeking of the positive. Number one, I am pleased to report, isn't negative at all. Two and three are pretty positive too. They may go downhill from there, though.

1. When I realized, yes, I WOULD be missing this race, I scheduled a trip to California, where I will be meeting two people I am very excited to see in person. They are:

My month-old niece, Lucy Anne!

And:

Caroline, the Canadian Runner in Exile

Who needs a half-marathon?

2. I am catching up on sleep in a serious way. It's true, I do get up early on some weekdays to get the recumbent bike sessions in. But since I'm sleeping in on the every other days off that I'm forced to be taking by the physical therapy process, I'm getting at least four hours more of sleep per week than I was getting when I was running and/or spinning six days a week. This feels GOOD.

3. I have more energy to pay attention to my diet, and it shows. I have gained no weight since the running interdiction. I'm continuing my "no sugar except on Sundays" thing beyond Lent. I still have cravings for sugar, but they are much abated. On Monday, the day after my Easter chocolate binge, I actually felt hung over. My mind seems to have finally learned that sugar is the reason for that lousy state--and has stopped asking for it. Today I sailed by the candy bowl at work and only later realized I....didn't....even....want....it.

4. Learning patience is no longer optional. I have to learn it in order for this never to happen again. And I never want this to happen again.

5. An easy 20-minute run is no longer something I would turn my nose up at. I'd be slavishly grateful to be able to do one, in fact. Small blessings, right?

6. I've been forced to slow down in many ways. This has not been a bad thing. But I'm learning that I'm really not a person who wants to slow down. When I can go fast again, I will. I need to remember point number 4 in the meanwhile, though. Sigh.

7. The last time I had this little control over what I wanted to do with my time was when I had two infants/toddlers. I like having control. Life doesn't always let you have control. Suck it up.

8. Boy, being injured does nothing for helping you become a nicer person. I'm jealous--GREEN WITH ENVY--of everyone running the Boston Marathon on Monday, the Bolder Boulder in May and just about any race you can name out there. True, I would not have been at Boston even had I not been injured. I haven't earned a spot. But at least I could have been working towards it.

OK, so that's not a good thing about not being able to run. I guess maybe learning about your own bad qualities is a good thing, because then you can work toward improving them. Except I'm finding it really hard to do that. I'm just....jealous, and likely to stay that way.

What would a good person do? Walk races, maybe. Volunteer. Go out and cheer other people on. I do plan to do the latter for Kathy and Cynthia and Jill and Julie (and virtually for others of you). You are friends and I want you all to succeed. But I don't want to walk races or volunteer right now. I just don't. I want to run. If I can't run and there's no one to cheer for, I'm staying home and doing my PT exercises for the umpteenth time.

9. I'm starting to resent the Facebook pages I've liked that have anything to do with running. I'm particularly sick of the one that says, "You either ran today or you didn't." Yeah, so I didn't. Can YOU come fix my back so I can, please? No? Then don't thrust that self-righteous statement in my face.

Maybe this will teach me to be less self-righteous toward non-runners. Maybe they have reasons we don't understand for not doing what they don't do.

10. I'm being more pushy with my husband about his running. Every day that he runs I make him share every detail with me. The hill was....how steep? And how much did you sweat? What did it feel like when you were done? Did you know there's a 5K at the Reservoir next week? Wanna do it? Can I watch?

It's sort of pornographic, voyeuristic, something.

Lucky thing, he still loves me. Even after nearly six weeks of me not being able to run, when I'm not loving myself so much.

Physical Therapy Ch. 5

It's almost Boston Marathon time, and the happy preparation tales have been out there for several weeks. Which makes the post I did last year even more relevant now than it was then. I wish I could say my character had improved some in a year, but I guess it hasn't.

Sometimes the task ahead of you isn't the task you want to work on. But you have to work on it anyway. And that brings me to......

Two steps forward.....one step back.......

It's now been five weeks since I began physical therapy.

Today, after a two-week hiatus, I had a visit with Sue. It was good timing because yesterday morning (Easter Sunday) I woke up with the worst pain I'd had since beginning the process of trying to make my back better. I don't know what I did to provoke it. I hadn't even been on the recumbent bike in two days due to the holiday craziness at my house (in-laws visiting, volunteering at the church potluck, two five-year-olds with three Easter egg hunts to attend) and the gym having odd hours.

Sue worked her magic with needles, adjustments and some massage-like manipulation, and I feel much better. She also said it wasn't a huge step backwards or anything dire--my sacro-iliac joint had gotten a bit out of alignment again. I don't have to step back my exercises or my time on the bike.

But it's deflating because I had been feeling much better in the days leading up to Sunday, enough that I could honestly have said the pain was the least I could remember having for a long time, enough that simple motions that have hurt for a really long time (like putting my elbows on my knees when sitting down, pushing in the clutch in the car with my left foot and twisting to watch behind me when backing out the car) were starting to...not hurt...at all. The PT exercises were starting to feel easier. The muscles in my lower abs are starting to feel more like muscles contracting and less like the twitch of a dying mouse (this at least hasn't changed!).

I told Sue all of that. She said I still need to take it easy this week, not add anything new, and let the latest issue unwind itself. The only new instructions are to do some mild stretches when I first wake up (knees to the chest, cat/cow) and, because I'm a stomach sleeper, put a pillow under my belly when I sleep to keep my back from arching. Had I come to her without Sunday's flare-up, she said she might have let me add some consecutive days on the bike and some new PT exercises--but now that won't be happening this week. I also asked her about the Bolder Boulder 10K (on Memorial Day) and, alas, it's not going to happen for me this year either.

She did say that we will probably be talking--soon, she said!--about transitioning me back to running. She mentioned the Alter-G and pool running, both of which would be an amazing treat to me. Pool running is the cheaper option since I belong to the rec center, but I might be willing to pay for (or even use one of my precious insurance-covered PT appointments for) a session or two on the Alter-G. It's just so much more like real running than slogging it back and forth in a pool (where music isn't an option).

Thank you all for your thoughtful comments and stories on my last post. I plan to reply to them all in the next couple of days (along with catching up with your blogs). Happy late Easter, everyone! I ate some sweets and I hope you all did, too.

Adult-Onset Athlete

Many of you out there in the running blog world have been athletes for a long time. Off the top of my head, I can think of a baseball player, a horsewoman, a gymnast, a figure skater, and numerous participants in cross-country and track (of course).

But there are others of you who are like me: adult-onset athletes.

I wasn't a complete non-participant in sports as a child. I played several seasons of elementary-school soccer, made one sad attempt at being on the basketball team in seventh grade, one attempt at cross-country in ninth grade and spent a miserable season in tenth grade on the high-school soccer team. Despite these desultory efforts, or maybe because of them, I never would have called myself an athlete back then.

Nor do I think I deserved the label. The elementary-school soccer was entirely at the behest of my parents. I remember numerous ignoble attempts to avoid going to games, including faked illnesses and one day where I hid under the bench to avoid being made to play goalie. (Goalies, I had learned, were always blamed when the team lost.) I quit playing soccer as soon as my mother's will crumbled before my lack of interest.

I tried basketball, cross-country and soccer because as I got older, I became aware that people who played sports were cooler than people who didn't. This was not, however, a good reason to participate, and so I eventually failed at all these efforts too. It didn't help that none of those teams had coaches with any interest in or empathy for kids who exhibited little talent from the get-go. I'm not saying I'm an advocate for the "everyone's a winner" attitude. Far from it. But I'm also not a fan of those coaches (and the three in question all fit this description) who gave off a tacit "If you're not a winner, you're a loser" vibe.

Middle- and high-school sports did nothing for me but make me feel like a loser: cowardly, awkward, the furthest thing possible from an athlete. There's a famous John "The Penguin" Bingham quote: "The miracle is that I had the courage to start." The Penguin (I think) was talking about running a marathon. But in my case, the miracle is that I ever had the courage to enter a race. Someday I'll tell you the story of that first race, and why I think it "took" when nothing else ever had.

For today, though, I'm thinking about these things because Jeff at The Logic of Long Distance has a recent post about how un-reflective he was as a young athlete and how reflective he is now, and how he views this change. He writes, "What would the 20 year old runner I used to be say about the runner who now writes these blog posts? Then, I did not think of running as therapy, I thought of it as an expression of passion, joy, and competitive spirit. I engaged in it recklessly....[running] needed no further justification beyond the fact that I was good at it, loved it, and wanted to do well for my coaches and teammates."

Reading it, I felt a little sad that I have never been that kind of runner (or that kind of athlete). Yes, I'm grateful to have become a runner and an athlete at all. Given my past attitude toward sports, it really is a sort of (very) minor miracle. And, yes, I do have chill-down-the-spine moments during good runs and races. My running is not without passion.

But I still envy those of you who had that young, impetuous, all-in athletic experience, who fell in love with sports early enough to bring an unpremeditated enthusiasm to them, who remember a time when you didn't need to think so so hard about what running means to you or why it should mean anything. Jeff, and many of you reading this, got to be both kinds of athlete. I will only ever be the reflective, sometimes hesitant adult variety.


Do you remember a time when you were a young athlete, the kind Jeff describes? How much of that is left in you, and how are you different now? Do you regret the change?

Or are you the adult-onset variety, thoughtful, grateful, still a bit in awe that you're doing it all?

The Cleanse Report

Can't see nothin' in front of me
Can't see nothin' coming up behind
I make my way through this darkness
I can't feel nothing but this chain that binds me
Lost track of how far I've gone
How far I've gone

How high I've climbed
On my back's a sixty pound stone
On my shoulder a half mile line

--Bruce Springsteen

This morning I woke early, stepped outside to drive to the gym and ran smack into my favorite kind of weather. Chilly, cloudy, misty, still. A front was moving in, sweeping out the heat we've been experiencing for two weeks now (yesterday's high was 84, too hot for April Fool's Day, I'm sorry).


I wanted to run so badly.


But I put in 65 minutes on the recumbent and watched a glorious sunrise through the window from the bike. The golden disc of the sun slipped above the horizon, briefly shining in on me through the flower-covered tree branches outside. Then it just as quickly slipped under the cloud bank, leaving the eastern sky pink in its wake like a small dusk. The wind kicked up.


Now, on my lunch break, I still want to run. But I'm willing to be patient longer. I've been in my sacro-iliac support belt except for sleep and showers for four weeks now. I've been doing my exercises. Two days ago, I think I could actually feel that my transverse abdominis muscle is flexing more. My back still hurts in the morning and if I do too much bending or sitting. But I'm making progress.


Yes, I can be patient.


And now, because cleaning up the food act and not gaining weight is an important part of the physical therapy process too, here's a diet update.


The restrictive part of my cleanse ended Thursday and went well. For this part, I used the four-day "kick-start" that's part of the Prevention Flat Belly Diet plan (the book is just called Flat Belly Diet). I never do the full diet (no diet has ever worked long-term for me), but this "kick-start" is great because it's all four days of menus and snacks spelled out for you and it's all about busting cravings, eating clean (complex carbs, protein, fruits and vegetables) and eliminating possible allergens (wheat and dairy and soy). It's very similar to the way I like to eat leading up to a marathon so I don't have any poop issues during the race.


I do NOT adhere to their calorie restriction guidelines (roughly 1,200 a day for the four days)--I exercise too much for that, even at my cut-back level right now. What I DO use are the food suggestions for each meal and snack, and the "Sassy Water" recipe (stupid name, good stuff). If I'm hungry, I stick to the same foods, just eat more of them.


On Friday, I started eating normally again, and was pleased to note that my cravings for sweets and carbs were MUCH better than their frenzied level before the four days. True, on Saturday night, out to dinner with friends en route to The Hunger Games, I went nuts with chips and guac, a glass of wine and two super tasty fish tacos that left me feeling over-full for several hours afterward. But I went back to clean eating all day yesterday and skipped my Sunday treats. Saturday night's lapse must not have done too much damage, because I didn't miss the chocolate at all and still don't. Hopefully I can keep this going!


Meanwhile, I'm still taking the herbal supplements, a product by Renew Life called "First Cleanse." I take two in the morning that supposedly work on my liver, blood etc. and two in the evening that are supposed to help with elimination. They are reputedly pretty mild as these things go (I deliberately chose a product for newbies), and honestly I don't know if they are really doing anything. But they certainly aren't hurting, and if they're playing a role in the craving reduction, I'm all for them.


Tomorrow is my weekly weigh-in. I don't expect to have lost weight, but I don't think I've gained any either. As long as I can maintain my weight through this hiatus from running, I'll be one happy rehab patient.