A Taste of Running Again
Thursday, August 7th, 2008
I ran my first mile in 9 weeks. I walked our dog, Teddy, to the Piedmont High School track, tied him up, and tentatively stepped down the stadium stairs while gripping the handrail. (I’m so cautious when walking now, scared I might fall.) Fog hugged the San Francisco skyline but the sun was burning off the marine layer here in the East Bay. Kids from my kids’ grades gathered in the center field, enrolled in a summer lacrosse camp, and I vaguely hoped I wouldn’t see their parents or anyone else I knew because I didn’t want anyone to witness my stiff jog, which I might have to abandon after a mere half-lap if any sharp pains cut through my foot.
Before I stopped running on June 3, I was logging around 50 miles a week and coming to this track regularly to run mile repeats in the 6 min. - 6:20 range and sub-3-min. 800s.
I had been more focused on building endurance than speed, however, because I had been training for three events from April through June 1: the Big Sur Marathon (a hilly 26.2), the Ohlone 50K (31 miles with nearly 8000 feet elevation gain, over two mountain peaks in heat that reached the high 90s), and the Lake Chabot Half Trail Marathon (13.1 miles of spiking and rolling hills here in my extended back yard, the East Bay Regional Park system). Big Sur and Ohlone had strangely similar results: I won my 35 – 39 age division and placed fourth female overall in both. At the Chabot Half, I finished 2nd but felt lousy, seven minutes slower than the previous year when I won it. My right quad had a deep ache, as though the muscles were beginning to detach from the bone, and I knew it needed a rest. So I took the first two weeks of June off and glumly watched the blank days in my training log stack up. All I wanted was to keep running hard and launch a 16-week training cycle for my first 50-miler in the fall.
Looking back at this mindset, I recognize how I was cooking up a recipe for injury, because anytime I become too focused on training and competing in a race — that is, focused on the end result, rather than primarily valuing the process of steady, healthy training — then I wind up injured because I was paying more attention to preconceived notions of how many miles I should train, how many speed intervals I should do, etc., rather than listening to my body’s cues and appreciating the process. Make the process the goal, I vowed a couple of years ago, the last time I sustained a significant injury after a racing season and had to take extended time off. Listen to your body, make healthy and steady training the goal, and fast times at races will be a byproduct of that approach. I was ignoring my own advice.
First, the quad strain. Then, following the two weeks of rest, a completely avoidable, why-did-I-let-this-happen-to-me accident on June 13 (Friday the 13th). I was rushing out the door with a heavy duffle bag in each hand at 4:30 a.m., when it was pitch black outside, to join my kids, who were climbing into an airport shuttle van. We were set to fly to visit my folks in Minnesota. I turned off the porch light, not wanting the lights to be on all day. And then bam! I slipped, fell down the six porch steps, and landed with my foot rolled under my butt and shooting pains radiating around my ankle. I cursed (shit! no! shit!) and tried quickly to assess how badly I was hurt. My 10-year-old daughter, Colly, kept repeating, Are you okay? Are you okay? I’m okay, I’m okay, I told her and myself. Bad sprain. It was more painful than any fall I’ve had on the trail, but just an ankle roll. We had to get to the airport. I limped to the van, got an ice pack at a pharmacy along the way, and put up with the pain for the remainder of the long weekend. I self-treated with RICE (rest, ice, compression, elevation) and walked as little as possible. A bruised stripe crossed the top of my foot diagonally, over the area where the ligaments had been wrenched. It’ll be fine, it’ll be fine, I told myself.
Fast forward a week: It was not responding to treatment. I woke up one morning with a sense of dread that something was not right in my foot. It took visits to the physical therapist, sports doc, orthopedist, and an X-ray followed by CT scan to get a proper diagnosis: an avulsion fracture of the navicular bone. The ligaments had snapped so much and the impact of the fall was so great that the corner of this triangular bone had cracked from the pressure. The orthopedist put me in a Velcro walking cast for 5 weeks and told me not to run for another 4 weeks after the cast comes off. I would be lucky to return to jogging (that dreaded “j” word) in mid-August, in very small increments, and shouldn’t expect to run relatively normally until September.
So that’s why I approached the track on this day with trepidation and anticipation. I walked to the edge of the field, where I planned to run laps on the soft turf just inside the inside the lane so that the impact on my feet and legs would be reduced as much as possible. I started my watch – determined to stick to a limit of 10 minutes, which my doctor and trainer had advised — walked a few steps, and then transitioned ever so carefully into a shuffling jog, barely lifting my feet off the ground. All thoughts were focused on my bad foot and ankle: Would the area of the fracture hurt? Would the ligaments tweak? But my attention immediately shifted to my right Achilles tendon, which felt as stiff and uncomfortable as if I were an arthritic grandma. I kept going – one lap, then two.
I recalled a Runners’ World article in which the co-author, a mom training for a marathon, had to stop running for over a month in the middle of her training cycle due to a broken heel bone; like me, she compensated by cross-training on a stationary bike to prevent the aerobic conditioning and muscle tone from evaporating entirely. She wrote about how when she was finally cleared to run, she felt like she was leaping out of gates at Pamplona to charge ahead of the bulls. All her pent-up desire to run was cut loose and she discovered she hadn’t lost her speed; if anything, she was more fit and fast than before. Two words came to my mind: If only! Running again for these mere 10 minutes felt horribly awkward, as though I were meeting a friend from high school I hadn’t seen in 20 years and for the first ten minutes we’re polite and guarded, unable to pick up where we left off and not sure if we will still be friends.
Finally, by the fourth lap, the ankle loosened, the stride lengthened. I was still going very slowly (maybe a 9 or 9:30 pace) but as I neared the 10-minute time limit, I felt like I wanted to go on. The key to coming back from injury, I’ve been told and have learned in the past, is to stop before it hurts. Stop when you feel like you can do more. It’s totally counter to my normal mindset of pushing past discomfort and digging deep to go farther than I thought I could, but to get back to that point, I’ll have to be conservative now. So I stopped after four and a half laps and walked up to my dog, who was tied up and waiting calmly — whose patience and acceptance I should try harder to emulate.
I shrugged at my dog (and at myself) because I didn’t know quite what to make of that first run back. I imagined how my 7-year-old son, Kyle, would react if I took him out to ice cream (his absolute favorite thing). What if I told him ahead of time that he can try some now, but he has to wait a month before he can actually order a whole ice cream cone? He would look at me utterly crestfallen and argue the unfairness before accepting the situation. Then I would ask, “Do you want to try some now anyway?” and he’d agree because he wants a taste at least. The ice cream shop worker would hand him a bite of Cookie Dough ice cream on a plastic spoon, and rather than let his eyes close dreamily as he normally does with a first bite, Kyle would look at me with bitterness. The taste of the single bite would barely register with him because he’s so preoccupied with the fact that he has to wait for weeks to get a full serving.
Of course, I would never torment him like that. But this 10-minute run felt like that taste – like a tease. It’s not as though I had expected the heavens to open, angels to sing, and my feet to take flight. But, I had hoped to feel and fulfill that “running with the bulls” type of surge. I should be happier that the injured area didn’t hurt – but I can’t get over how far from my regular running self I still feel, and how patient I will need to be to come back gradually in the coming weeks.
Tags: life, marathoning, Oakland, parenting, Piedmont, Running, trail running, writing