No Title at All

I do not have much to talk about in regards to my training.  All I have been doing is an irregular 1 hour bike ride as a way to pay lip service towards staying in shape.  My coach is telling me that I need to increase this time to 2 hours per session, but I’ll have to see about that.  I think 2 hours per night in the saddle is much more than I can “stand” at this point.

Actually, I can’t even stand when riding my bike.  I finally spoke to my doctor after my bone scan and the sad news is that I have 3 stress fractures.  Two in my right leg and a nasty one in my left leg.  What concerned him was the fact that I took the bone scan 3.5 weeks since I stopped running and the stress fractures looked like they were nice and fresh.  I guess I have quite a bit of healing to do.  So it looks like I won’t be running for a minimum of 8 weeks and possibly even 12 weeks.  I don’t know what this means for the VT 100, but it is still my intention to give it a shot.  I may not be able to do the race in the timeframe I was hoping for, but I am thinking that I could gut it out.  I even got my twitter friends @jacklhasa and @scarab to come to Vermont with me to be my crew.  I am sure with some encouragement and the appropriate moments that I can get through the race.  I just need my legs to heal.

So what else is new… Obviously my blog.  I’ve finally made the move to my own domain name at the prompting of my friend Greg Barnett.  Greg owns his own web design company Rock’n Motion Design and was good enough to set it up for me.  I think it looks pretty fancy.  Thanks Greg!

I also secured my entry into this year’s ING NYC Marathon.  Normally I would just call it the NYC Marathon, but I must give attribution to ING, since my entry is courtesy of them.  ING is the plan administrator for my company’s 401(k) plan and they reserve a couple of spots for their clients.  I am the happy beneficiary of one of these spots, so thank you very much ING! 

Getting back to my inability to run, I must say that I am not angry or depressed over it.  I am depressed for other reasons, but my inability to run right now is not one of them.   I am at peace with myself over this turn of events because I now know I pushed myself as far as I could go before I stopped running.  I didn’t stop because of the pain.  I stopped because the stress fractures were affecting my ability to walk.  In other words I am somewhat proud of myself for the fact that I was able to push myself to the point where I was virtually crippled.  Yes this is probably a pretty stupid way to look at it, but that is just me.  I didn’t let a little pain stop me, even though logically I know this was my body signaling to me that something is going seriously wrong and that I ought to stop.  It gives me confidence to know that I can push myself further than is reasonably possible and that I can deal with difficult circumstances.  It was a good fact for me to learn about myself, because I am going to use that knowledge to help me in other areas of my life.

I need to keep pushing and to keep trying.  I can’t let things get me down no matter how much they weigh on me.  I somehow have to figure out how to deal with my pain and continue on until I know that I will be irreparably harmed and then make adjustments or simply figure out how to deal with it.  Sometimes the only way is to step back and let yourself heal.