from mile to marathon

The journey of a thousand leagues begins from beneath your feet.
Lao-Tzu

Saturday, September 16, 2006

stuck

I want to go back to my happy running days. Not that I liked running, ever, but I had opened up to it. We had reached a comfortable relationship, the running and I. Now that relationship is strained.

It must have something to do with the pain in my groin. I walk now with a visible limp. Envisioning what running would be if I could just take that pain away somehow, immediately removed the dread.

I picked up Marathon for Dummies again and leafed through the chapter on injuries, on which I had not been keen first time around. Still wasn’t. Anyhow, it seems that I pulled a groin muscle. The fact that I have actually sustained an injury, not by accident (a fall, a slip), simply by running, makes me feel bad, almost guilty, as if I have let someone down. Not myself – I would have hobbled around conscientiously, without bother, until the thing had run its course. Not myself, no - the running perhaps.

It says something about how much I am lagging behind my own life that it took two weeks before I looked up an injury. Okay, so now I have to get rid of it. I hope I can do it with stretching and ice baths, because I do not want to take a break from running. Tomorrow I have my weekly “big run,” and no idea whether I am supposed to run through the pain, or first take care of it. I dread running, but the prospect of stopping, even for a few days, somehow scares me.

I want to run the marathon and I am stuck with a groin injury at mile 13.

1 Comments:

At 6:29 AM, Blogger Lora said...

Here's where the real runner in you will come through. We have all sustained injuries--some severe, but most are minor and due to overuse and imbalance of our bodies.

Stay off running for a few days--stretch and ice and try again. You'll find you'll come back even stronger if it's not a severe injury. The trick is to figure out your own special imbalances and do what it takes to correct it. This is the fun part of running!! ;)

Hang in there!

 

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