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.