Definitely better to blog about a race the day of or after, but life has been so crazy that now a week later I am finally getting to it....Lets see, where to begin. I was SO excited to run this marathon pretty much since we signed up last fall. My life was kind of falling apart in more ways than one and knowing that I had a marathon to train for and to look forward to was kind of the thing that kept me tethered and sane for many, many days, so if nothing else I am grateful for that. Then in February I started really hitting my stried, feeling strong and feeling fast. Come March I am feeling even better. Tiger in a cage, right Luz? The 3-4 weeks before the marathon I am running 8:15 AP and doing 7:00-7:30s for my last mile. I am thinking it is totally time to BQ for the summer. And then, of course, the injury hits. Twinging in my leg for a few days. Turns into pain in my leg for a few days. Turns into can barely walk for a few days. Talk to the doctor at church (nice, I know--but I was leaving for the marathon 2 days later and have no doctor or physical therapist here in Knox). He says likely stress fracture, go ahead and run, fix it later. So I take 10 days off before the marathon and do nothing. Then we are off to D.C. At this point I don't care about the running fast part. I am just happy to be on vacation with my family in my birthplace--a place I had not visited for almost 20 years. I got to see my old house and my old school. We had dinner with our dear, dear friends from Iran. We went to all the cool museums and my daughter got to see Amelia Earhart's plane. We swam in hotel pools and rode the metro. And best of all, on Friday we got to see one my bestest friends and favorite people--none other than the famous LuzyLew! So it was good and by Friday I just didn't care about the run, just happy to be here. Then I remembered that we had come to run after all and that all those months of training had to somehow make up for my dang stress fracture, so Luz and I headed out early Saturday morning for the marathon, both of us feeling a little bit of trepidation about how the dang leg might hold up. And then came the biggest rookie mistake of all time never to be repeated. I have been taking Aleve morning and night hoping that this ritual will somehow not ruin my intenstines, liver, and other digestive organs and that it will magically heal the fracture through its anti-swelling properties. The morning of the race I figure I should take 2 for good measure, and I remember hearing a few years back from PT Steve Oreck that it digests in a different part of your stomach, so no worries about stomach pain. Yeah. He was wrong. At least for me. Luz and I ran a glorious 3-4 miles towards the capitol feeling good and taking it slow and just reveling in the fact that we were in D.C. RUNNING A MARATHON!!! Then it started to hit. The bathroom urges. The uncontrollable stomach pains, the cramps, the, "I want to sit on a toilet, pass out, and die" simultaneously. To save you the stop-by-stop Porta Potty recap, lets just say it started at about mile 6 and continued until mile 12 stopping almost every mile at every Porta Potty and a Starbucks in between. Luz kept saying I needed to decide by Mile 13 if I was going to do it or not. I kept worrying that because of the dang 5 hour time limit that if I didn't speed up, which felt impossible to do given the churning of my stomach, that we were going to get swept off the course and for the first time ever I would be a non-finisher on my first dang marathon out of the state of Utah. I hate to quit and would pretty much die rather than quit, but what do you do when they force you off? I have to admit that the serious horribleness of my stomach and digestive feelings, however, just about did me in. At around mile 9, while in the porta potty, I just leaned against the door and wanted to cry and die. I felt so horrible--like I usually do AFTER a race when I lay on the floor for a few hours, and yet here I had 17 miles to go. I had apparently lost my mental capacity at this point because I started to try and think of creative solutions like waiting it out for 8 hours in a local restuaraunt, then running the course by myself, or coming back the next day, or anything to get passed this horrible feeling but still finish what I had started. And so I ended up doing what Cath does best when all else fails...I just kept plugging along and plugging along, stopping and stopping and stopping as needed. I kept telling myself, "It has to pass. It has to pass. It WILL pass if I run long enough." By Mile 12 I was feeling slightly better. By Mile 13 I was telling Luz in my strongest words that there was NO WAY I was quitting. By Mile 14 the stomach issues had mostly resolved, and though I was left feeling weak and dehydrated, at least I could run without feeling the need to pass out or lay down. Miles 14-19 passed in a blur. I asked Luz how far we were and couldn't believe when 14 had magically become 17. I talked and talked about who knows what just to keep my mind off the mileage and to try and make up for months of being Luz-less. Poor Luz had to listen to my half-crazy (blaming it on dehydration) rambling about everything under the sun. Then suddenly, we were at 20. (Memo to race directors: MILE MARKERS WOULD BE NICE--I will even pay $5.00 extra next year to pay for some dang balloons to mark the race). At mile 20, as is the case always for me, I started to feel it and things were starting to hurt. At this point, I was actually starting to get blurry vision as well. Not good, but couldn't remember why it wasn't good (Scott later told me this means serious dehydration--most likely caused by the expungement of all bodily fluids at the 5 porta potty stops). Decided not to tell Luz. She has a mother-hen instinct that I dearly love but I didn't want her to tell me to stop or slow down; we were so close. Then we didn't have the choice to slow down or not because we were running through the hood--full on Anacostia and a gang funeral with police lining the streets. Luz motioned for me to speed up; I was so close to delirious that I didn't realize it was to avoid serious bodily harm. Run or be shot was pretty much our only choice at that point. As we came to the last few Luz looked so good and so strong; I felt guilty for making it such a slow and messy race for us, but was slightly comforted by the thought that last year I got the 2 marathons where Luz felt like crap and I felt like running some more and doing those kind of marathons all day long, so maybe it was her turn to have a nice, easy marathon, if there ever was such a thing. In the last mile I saw my husband and kids waiting. Madeline ran out and ran the last 1/4 mile with me holding my hand. I felt like a proud, cool mom and was happy to finish without getting kicked off.
All in all, a messy, messy race and for reasons not expected. The dang Aleve just about killed me but I was glad I made it through it. I learned several lessons from this race. 1. Don't experiment ever on a race day and definitely NEVER take meds on an empty stomach again. 2. Even on your worst most horrible days, you can still finish. 3. Mental strength and focus; I didn't have it this race--I literally think back and all I can remember is crazy crazy crazyness in my head, and though I would like to berate myself for the lack of focus while running a freakin' marathon, I am glad that even given the lack of any mental discipline, I finished anyway. 4. Best friends are the best; they stick with you even in the dumps (literally in our case). And finally 5. Sometimes its good enough just to show up and finish. Who cares how long it takes or how messy it is? I didn't come for the race; I just came to finish what I had trained for. And I did.
And now to cap off the longest post in the history of the blog no doubt (I would request that a record be posted in my name as I am unlikely to ever hold any other record on this blog) the aftermath...apparently small stress fracture then marathon equals big stress fracture. The following Monday I could barely walk. Wednesday I made official visit to aforementioned doctor. I have now been officially BOOTED. 3 weeks minimum. But, in the spirit of new lessons learned, "Frankly, I don't give a da**." I will live to run another day, and so long as I know this boot is temporary, I will enjoy the prescribed time off by packing up my house and moving BACK across the country to the home I hope to never leave again--UTAH HERE WE COME!!! |