Nine Weeks To Go

So today I am blogging instead of running the 20 miles or so I had originally planned.  I’m a little sad about that, and I’ll explain more about that farther down, but first I need to point out some really cool stuff.

Thanks to the generosity of many families and individuals I have reached “Mile 18.3” of my Boston Marathon fundraising goal for World Vision.  As it stands today, with 9 weeks and 1 day left until the race we have already reached, symbolically, the town of Newton, Massachusetts.  We are now in the toughest part of the race, the Newton Hills, and Heartbreak Hill is only a couple more miles ahead.  When we clear the top of that bad boy at about mile 20.5 ($2,050) we should be able to look down into Boston and sense that the finish line is near.  To the folks who have already donated, I could not be more grateful.  From here until the finish line, though, I think I’m going to have to step up my communication efforts and attempt to widen my audience.  It should be exciting to see what happens.  I’ll try real hard not to “hit the wall” and start walking before we reach the finish line on Boylston Street.

My knee hurts.  I should have run 20 miles today to round out a 60 mile week, or better still, if my knee had not been hurting off and on for the last 4 weeks I should have finished off a 65 or 70 mile week this week.  When I went out for an easy 8-mile run yesterday it went like many of my runs have gone recently.  I felt great for the first few miles, but by the last few miles my knee was uncomfortable enough that it was altering my stride.  Usually, when pain increases during a run it is a bad sign.

On January 7 I ran a good, hard workout of 400m intervals and felt a little pain in the knee, and then I ran 20 with a good friend of mine two days later and recall that my knee was a little sore at times during and after that effort, too.  The following week I ran a surprisingly good half marathon in part on slippery roads, but the next day I could barely run on my knee at all.  That really got my attention.  From then until now I’ve run only two workouts that could really be considered hard:  a 5k race and fast-finish long run on the treadmill.  The knee seemed to improve really quickly from the 15^th until the end of January, but now it has stalled out and some runs are really much worse than others, and I don’t sense that it is improving anymore.

With a marathon coming up in Texas next weekend (as a training run and to support a running buddy) I struggled in my mind all day yesterday about what to do next.  My fears are as follows.

1. Somehow I’ve injured something significant that is not going to heal on its own.  Meniscus comes to mind.  Probably this is irrational, but if true it is devastatingly consequential.  It would mean, possibly, more surgery, more recovery, missing Boston again for the fourth year in a row, maybe the end of my will to keep trying.  It could mean that I’ve crossed the divide and all my best is really now in my past forever.  That sounds really dramatic, but the fear is there even if it is half crazy.
2. I’ve tweaked something to the point that it will require a significant amount of rest and a massive setback at a time when I am running very very well and seem to be getting better with every race I run.  It breaks my heart to think of losing all that positive momentum.  It breaks my heart to think of going to Boston not positioned to do my best, or worse, to miss it again.
3. If I give my knee some rest this week and it starts feeling better I am fearful that the Austin Marathon this weekend will cause me another big setback and, again, it may cost me where I really want to do well which is in Boston.  I am already upset that my training schedule is going to get all screwed up this year because of this.  I am really really hungry for a good Boston run this year.  It’s been so long and I have dreamed about my comeback there since the night my knee went backwards during that fateful basketball game, but I might have to come to terms with the possibility that it just might not be in the cards to do well this year.  The beauty and the tragedy of running a marathon is that hundreds of things big and small have to go right to really run one’s best.

The course of action I have decided to take is to back off running significantly this week and plan to run the marathon “easy” and smart next Sunday.  If all goes well I will plan to ramp up training the last week of February to jump into a hard March.  I skipped my long run today and I’ll just run a few miles every other day this week.  In Austin I’ll try to help Todd run a good race, but if I feel the knee pain coming on I’ll be prepared to DNF or else just walk it in.  I don’t like to “plan to fail” in a race, but I am hoping that being prepared to retreat now might result in a strong advance later. 

Perspective

One thing I got to thinking today was that even if the worst of my fears comes true I have to have faith that the Lord knows what He is doing, remember that He loves me and remember that He has blessed me with some seriously fun running the last few months.  I have been blessed with the health over the last six months to run 5 personal record races in succession:  Twin Cities Marathon (big PR), 5k (big PR), 5k (slight improvement), Topeka-Auburn Half Marathon (big PR) and finally another huge 5k PR.  If I never ran another race, this has been one dandy of a streak that any runner would be happy about, and I am very grateful for it.  I hope it is not the end of what I can do, but if it is, it is a lot to be grateful for. 

I feel like I have been given a glance into what I could have become as a runner had I stayed with it when I went up to Kansas University in the fall of 1984.  That cannot now be changed, ever, of course.  But now I have seen enough of my potential to make some reasonable guesses about what could have been.  I was a pansy – I quit the team barely two weeks into it mostly because I was scared of the work I could see it would demand.  I’m not a pansy anymore and I am not afraid of the work, but unfortunately I’m now 44 and not 18.  Nevertheless, true or not, I suspect now that I really could have amounted to something as a “real runner” had I stayed with it.  It is sad that our opportunities do not always intersect with our motivation.  I am content, however, to enjoy the present and hope for the near future for a just a little more improvement before I really do get too old to try to run each race faster than the last.