Thursday, April 15, 2010

Bearing in mind that I am prone to hyperbole and histrionics.

Sigh. My feet hurt.

Siiiigh.

I thought I was taking it safe this time - stretching like crazy before and after runs; spending almost three months getting up to speed on a treadmill, and then another three keeping pace before venturing outside; edging in an extra day of running at only half the mileage.

Yeah, half was too much, apparently.

After Sunday's race, my shins went on strike, and my feet and hamstrings have been hinting their plans to join the union. The last four days have been spent icing, stretching, and taking the five stages of grief ridiculously out of context as I jump from depression to acceptance to denial and anger, both at once, and then back to depression over these shooting pains that themselves seem to jump between muscles without rhyme or reason. The one thing I'm not doing, really, is jogging. Or walking or biking, for that matter, or any of those  "low impact cardio" routines that you're supposed to jump in on to keep from losing momentum.

In my moments of lucidity, I'm not seeing this as a big deal. So I'll be sedentary, nothing new, for two weeks, maybe a month, and then, worst comes to worse, I'll hit the Couch to 5K again and be back to where I was by mid-summer. Running is a life-long endeavor, right? Doesn't really matter when I start, or where, or how many false starts precede success. Each failure is a learning opportunity, I'm glad I tried it, yada yada.

Yeah. And then the louder voice in my head, the one that asks if I want to eat another pear and then scolds me for being hungry at all; the one that isn't sure I should be knitting from a pattern, unless everyone ELSE is knitting from that pattern, and then why haven't I already knitted from that pattern; the one that closes its eyes and shakes its head - the voice does this - when all I buy is silly little MAINSTREAM comic books; this voice is saying, run through it! Then get thee to a podiatrist! But no matter what he or she says, run through it, ya wimp, because when you're twenty-five and running less than twelve miles a week, injuries SHOULD! NOT! HAPPEN! Pfft, it says. Pfft.

That "get thee to a podiatrist" part, though? That holds water. Here's hoping for rainbows and orthopedics. Because I'm really, really wired. And I really, really need to burn it off.

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