The Injury: Part 4

(How long will this series last? We're past the halfway point, readers.)

When the body is in proper working order -- when all the muscles, tendons, ligaments, bones, sheaths, fascia, and miscellaneous gristle are untroubled by tears, pulls, strains, inflammation, and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to; when all the nerves are firing harmoniously to maintain order and balance; when the heart is keeping time with measured beats, and the arteries are carrying gloriously oxygenated blood through miles and miles of well-maintained capillaries; and when the whole system is fed and happy and allowed to rest once in a while -- then running seems like the most natural and simple thing in the world. You just go out there and do it. When you get tired, you stop. When your muscles ache, you go easy for a few days. In short, running happens without much external effort or strife.

But let one thing go awry and there is kinesthetic hell to pay. Let one strand of tissue give out and tear, and that tear affects a muscle that you've never heard of, and that muscular discomfort causes a slight and almost unconscious compensation in an otherwise fluid stride, and that compensation leads to different patterns of stress and wear that bring secondary injuries. The fluid stride goes slightly out of tune, and the effort becomes too conscious of itself. The simple act of running becomes... puzzling.

At the beginning of April, I was frankly puzzled.

Was I injured or wasn't I? Was I sick or tired or what? Every day, I could imitate the running motion rather convincingly, and any outside observer would guess that I was just as happy (or just as unhappy) as all the other plodders clogging the streets and sidewalks of the metropolis. But every step Was uncomfortable, and the way I did it, it didn't feel like running. It felt like penance. But I wasn't sure exactly what I had done wrong, and when my debt would be paid.

In April, I turned a corner in my attitude from trying to continue to training to trying to broaden my perspective on this thing and figure out how to enjoy running again.

The first step, I knew, was to try to rid myself of all my expectations about what times I should be running and how it should feel. No, that's not quite right. I still clung to the idea that running should be pleasurable. In fact, I started consciously thinking about what made running enjoyable for me, and schemed how to make it so. So what made running fun? Well, I loved the camaraderie of running and valued my running friendships a great deal. On the other hand, I didn't feel capable of doing the same workouts I had been able to do before. So I started showing up to workouts with my own plan -- to run only half as far, or much slower. I couldn't have done this if my running buddies had not been 100% supportive and encouraging, and this meant a great deal to me. It's not always easy or pleasant to have a wounded runner jumping in and out of your interval workouts trying to figure out life. Terry and Jonathan and Tom never complained about this distraction.

Another thing that I had missed for several months was the experience of finishing any run strong. Too many of my runs and race recently had been ending poorly, my form in a shambles. I decided that even if I had to start slowly, at the back of the pack, I would finish strong. I ran one race in May in which I started out so slowly that I didn't pass our club's top 60-year-old woman until a half mile into the race. But I managed to finish strong!

I also made what seemed like a big decision to never run unless I felt like it. I took a lot of days off in April. Sometimes I got on my bike, but a lot of time, I didn't do anything at all. It was risky to flirt with the sedentary life, but after a couple of days of leisure, I always found my desire to run -- and my subsequent enjoyment -- much greater when I did get out there again. Of course, this meant that my weekly mileage shrunk into the teens.

And all the while, I kept trying to observe what worked and what didn't, what felt good and what felt injurious. I think I was still trying to pinpoint the single cause of all the trouble. Then, on a solitary run, I had a simple but compelling insight: there could be more than one problem. Looking for a single cause might not be the right strategy for getting healthy again. I started to see my injury as only one of a number of things that were out of kilter. The injury might have been a cause of my poor running, or it might have been the manifestation of other problems that had been developing for years. I started looking at my nutrition, my sleep patterns, how much time I allowed for warming up before and stretching after my runs. I started looking critically at what I was doing (or not doing) to maintain my core strength and flexibility. My life had been busy and stressful lately, but that was no excuse. If I couldn't follow good habits, then I had to stop running so much.

As for the injury itself, by the middle of May, I felt I had finally reached an important conclusion: I had to stop running in pain. if this seems obvious to my readers, then I only hope it will be just as obvious if they ever experience a similar injury. It took me months to get to this point, and it was a tough decision. But I had tried just about everything else, so in desperation I said good-bye to track workouts, tempo runs, races, strides, and anything else that had given me trouble over the past five months. Now, my only runs were at 7:00 pace or (usually) much slower.

Back to the drawing board.

(In Part 5, things finally start to turn around just in time for me to avoid losing all my readers.)