If you follow me on Instagram, you probably saw a photo I posted of my marathon bib when it arrived in the mail. Here it is:
The race is this Sunday. I won’t be there. Marathon fail.
The official diagnosis is tendonitis in my right foot. In practice it means the top of my right foot hurts like hell. I tried to push through the pain at first, but the doc wagged her finger at me and said no, in fact, I needed to rest it. She said to rest it through August. So, no marathon.
I am wildly disappointed. It’s not so much the race itself, but the fact that I am losing all the training I did up until the injury. I have continued to exercise (swimming and stationary bike), but it’s not the same.
It’s kind of like writing poetry with the hopes of getting back to a novel. I don’t write poetry, but you get the idea. In my head, the marathon has become one big metaphor for my novel. You work at it a little every day, you push, you do more than you thought you could, sometimes it’s rough, and other times you feel like you’re being carried along.
So in this metaphor, I guess the injury is kind of like losing a hard drive. I have a basic memory of the work that was done, but in practice, it’s all gone. Though given the choice between starting over on my marathon training and losing my hard drive, I’d keep the hard drive any day of the week. (That’s why I’m crazy good about backing up, but that’s a post for another day.)
I’ll start training again next week. It will suck. But I still have nine months to hit my goal of running a marathon before I turn 40. It’s not over yet.
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