I’ve been struggling for several months. A lingering injury in my right leg. It’s not plantar fasciitis. It’s not broken. It’s just… tweaked? Weak? Hurts. If emotional and situational stress has a tendency to attack one’s weakest physical part, this isn’t surprising either – my back and leg are definitely the proverbial soft underbelly, even if they aren’t, ya know, the actual soft underbelly… but come to think of that, that’s a sore spot too, emotionally and physically. Paul Simon said it best – “why am I so soft in the middle?”
All of this is prelude. And so is this – I broke down and went to a sports medicine orthopedist who confirmed it wasn’t a break or a stress fracture or anything like that. It was just… overuse? Bad form? But not necessarily completely bad form, just mostly a matter of degrees bad form. He sent me off to a PT clinic. Things went poorly there – I felt like Schrödinger’s Cat in that I was told to do both A and NOT A by 3 different experts on the physical therapy form/exercises. I do believe two things can be true at the same time… but I can’t be both A and NOT A if I’m trying to do the exercise. I also couldn’t tell when I was right or wrong in form… just that I was supposed to be both A and NOT A and my brain hurt. Maybe I’m not Schrödinger’s Cat… maybe I’m an old dog: I just can’t learn new things… or unlearn bad habits… or understand the process that they wanted me to undertake.
Ultimately the cost of the sessions outweighed their usefulness… or my patience. I believe in science and medicine… I just can’t seem to always get it to work for me.
I’ve tried following the exercises. I’ve tried taking it easy. But if I can’t run, if I can’t go out and burn off the crazy, I fear what stress that would introduce to my life.
And so it is that after a several month break from racing, I have a trip to San Francisco at the end of July. Given how undertrained I am, I thought it wise to book a training run here a few weeks out. So it is that I’ve signed up for another one of those three loop events out in Ventura. Because it’s last minute, the price is equivalent to what I’m paying for SF… which means, it’s exorbitant but sometimes we spend the money.
Hell, it’s less than two sessions at that PT place that didn’t seem to be helping me.
I opted for the early 6 AM start — it’s designed for people who need extra time or who just want to get going. A bit of a stress for the race organizers to deal with us day-of bib pickup folks and while they’re great organizers, I can also tell they live kinda at Defcon 1 even when the Defcon is of their own making. Not a criticism I make in malice, more an observation… after all, I’m guilty of such imagined and self-forced errors all too often… usually on days that end in Y as the old cliche goes.
Previous years at this race location you parked right at the site but I gather the surfers and local PD weren’t too happy with it — they had us park at a local school and get bused over but even so, folks did seem to be able to sneak their car into the venue and save the 10-15 minute shuttle ride. But I’m a rule follower (mostly) so did as they asked. Alas, because of the first shuttle idling in the parking lot at 5 AM for 20 minutes waiting for the second shuttle to arrive so we could leave, it meant once we got over to the race start line, the window before the early start was cut even finer. Again, it all worked out but made for a bit of a hectic process for all involved. I appreciated them doing it and facilitating it but yowza.
As I said, I’ve done this thing in previous years — You got out 2.5 miles to the RV parking section… run a mile or so there, and then once the RVs are done it’s about three quarters of a mile to the turnaround… and you run back to the start, retracing your steps to log about 8.75 miles per loop. So you do that three times. And it messes with your head… or at least it messes with mine. Every loop, that last 2.5 miles to the start felt interminable. And the last loop? The whole thing has a Yogi Berra deja vu all over again quality.
On the plus side, though my body was a bit pain-receptor-y in the opening miles, it settled down and seemed to be just fine – no worse for wear, about the same level or better as the miles clicked over. On the downside, because I haven’t been putting in the longer mileage runs for the last two months, my body lost most if not all of its long-haul endurance. I was just physically exhausted… not in pain, just beaten down with fatigue. I considered dropping out not because of pain but because I just didn’t seem to have the energy to put one foot in front of the other. I thought it important though to see how far I could go, given I’m looking at the San Francisco Marathon in two weeks.
Bottom line: I finished, if slow-walking sections, and though don’t think I’m doing physical damage to tendons or ligaments or muscles or whatever my “off-by-degrees” gait is to blame for per the Ortho docs of La Brea Avenue.
And while the wait time for the taco truck was 20 minutes, I had to wait for a shuttle bus anyway… and, well, tacos, yeah?
I don’t often come home from a race and take a nap but this return to running has me flopping into bed and pulling a sheet over my head. There’s worse ways to spend a lazy Sunday.