Saturday, April 23, 2011

Broken foot, Broken dreams.....

Runner's are not strangers to pain. In fact, I'd go so far as to say, that on most runs, most days, most runners feel some sort of pain in their body. But running, as my coaches always said, is 90% mental. So we train our brains to run through the pain, ignore the pain, or frankly, to just deal with it. But occasionally something hurts in a different way and a little alert in our brains goes off. That's what happened to me last Monday.

I was on what was supposed to be an easy 10 mile run. The trail was dirt, mostly downhill, and I was enjoying the thought that this run would only take an hour and a half (not the 3+ hours I had been trudging through as of late). However, around mile 5, I felt a pain, a shock of pain, that radiated through my foot with each step. I stopped for a moment, then started running again- still there. I walked for a while, tried running again- still there. That's when I called my Hubby to come pick me up.

Turns out my foot is fractured, likely the result of high arches mixed with concrete trails and lots of mileage. My podiatrist seems to think I can still run this marathon (which is, as I write, only 8 days away) as long as I wear the boot, don't run until race day, and take lots of pain killers. He's confident the foot will heal (enough) by race morning. In fact, he never even suggested not running the marathon. Regardless, I feel like my mental resolve and pre-race focusing is completely shot. Instead I'm constantly wondering if I will be able to run, how horrible the pain will be, or if I'll have to take the dreaded DNF next to my name. Only time will tell. But for now, I'm trying to stay positive.....and spending lots of time on the elliptical.....oh, and lugging this boot around everywhere I go.

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