The Morning After

The morning after a long run is a bellweather to how well training is going. If you can barely walk, you might have bitten off more than you can chew, trying too much too soon. If you're skipping up and down stairs, you might want to ramp things up.

Myself, on this cold Tuesday morning, I'm cautiously optimistic that my injury isn't serious. It feels much improved already, and while I will probably need at least two or three days rest so as not to push it, at this point, it's looking reasonably good that Thursday or Friday I'll be able to return to the roads and get in at least one, maybe even two short runs before I try for 16 on Monday. I looked up the injury online (an inexact method of diagnosis, admittedly), and all signs point to it being a minor calf strain. As with most running injuries, rest and ice is the main cure, with an expected recovery time of 3-5 days.

Other than that, I'm feeling pretty good. My shins and heel are fine. The blister on my toe is a minor irritation, but should harden over soon enough, and I'm obviously a bit tired in general - my neck and shoulders are particularly sore and fatigued - but were it not for my calf, and the wind outside, I would possibly have considered doing a short recovery run today, so all in all, it could certainly be worse.

It's one of the hardest things for a runner training for a marathon to take a few days off because of injury. You always feel that each day lost is a day you'll pay for on race day. It's a mental nightmare, and one of the hardest aspects of taking on such a brutal challenge.

The thing about it is, I think, that we are conditioned to believe that pain is something that can, and indeed should, be overcome. Professional athletes are always "playing through the pain", and are often mocked and belittled when they don't. When you see football players taking the field with dislocated shoulders, severely sprained ankles, arm casts, knee braces and concussions, the temptation is to say to yourself, well, if they are able to continue to soldier on with that kind of injury, why shouldn't I, as a lowly runner, ignore the shin splints and ignore the knee pain and simply keep running? That's what Brett Favre would do, if he were a runner, right? It's this 'hero lore' that has led us to the erroneous conclusion that athletic injuries are simply an occupational hazard to be endured, and not a barrier to performing at all.

Of course we're not professional athletes. We aren't blessed with their physical skills and conditioning, nor do we have access to the kind of medical treatment they do. We don't have to worry about losing our job or getting a pay cut if we're hurt either. Ultimately though, whatever our situation, we still want to be them. They are the modern day gladiators; superheroes for the masses.

Marathoning is somewhat unique in that it's a sport that allows us to unleash our own inner hero. We complete the same course the superstars of the sport do, run in their footsteps, drink the same water, and cross the same finish line. We're slower, but we run as far, and the same fans that cheered them are now cheering us. So, you can see, when injury strikes, and that dream is threatened, everything within us tells us to simply ignore the pain and hope it goes away.

But it doesn't go away. I found this to my cost in 2005 when training for the following year's Chicago marathon. Shin splints, shin schplints, I said. I can handle it; all I have to do is keep running. So run I did, even when it felt like knives were being stuck in my lower legs every time my foot landed on the concrete. Finally, I did stop, but not until way too late. I now think it's likely I had stress fractures in both legs. I remember taking two weeks off, then trying to run a mile, and barely making it. It was over, and would be weeks before I felt right again, by which time I'd missed my window.

Looking back through this diary at some of my logs and I can see that I've not come all the way around. I've still run a couple of times when I shouldn't have, and I've still run faster than I should have from time to time. I still hate missing a day that I'm scheduled to run. I don't like not being able to cross that day's mileage off on my calendar and not being able to blog about it here. Still, some lessons have been learned. I have taken an extra day or two off here and there, I have backed off on my training pace, I've warmed up and stretched, and I've built my mileage more steadily.

It's ironic. You would think that it's getting out and running that takes the self-discipline, particularly as the weather gets worse, but that's the easy part. It's the not-running when you know you should, that's the real challenge. These next few days of rest will be hard for me - no-one will ever say practicing patience is a joy - but what I have to keep telling myself is that they will likely be as crucial as any of my upcoming long runs. After all, if you go up for a jump ball too early, you simply come down with nothing to show for it while another guy runs off with your prize.

And that, as a wise poet once said, would suck.