(No way to miss it, I know. But this tale needs a lead-in.)
My legs have been hurting now for a number of weeks. Fairly chronically. In fact, so much so, that I've set the chat status on my G-mail account to permanently read "aching and paining." I was chatting there with an OKC friend this morning who led off by asking, "so are you still aching and paining? Really?"
Yes.
Sometimes it is the side of my right knee. Sometimes the outside of my left ankle. Sometimes both ankles. When I cross my knees while seated I feel it in my quads. This morning as I was standing -- yes, standing -- in my flat-foot orthotic mary janes waiting for the bus, a muscle halfway up my right thigh began throbbing in protest because evidently I was leaning too hard on it.
Oy. Thank heaven you can't get addicted to Advil.
This is my sixth marathon and I don't remember these aches and pains in the past, even after the hardest weeks of training. (Which, admittedly, we did just come through in mid-March.) Who knows. I refuse to play the age card here, but do contend that the minute after turning 35 my joint resiliance went downhill faster than Alberto Tomba.
Nonetheless, I am fully trained and ready to get on it April 20. Near to 65 friends have donated $4500 to benefit Children's Hospital Boston and, more directly, a patient there, a girl named Jayla from Rhode Island who has Cockayne's Syndrome, in whose name I am running this year. Many of them will be out on the course to cheer me.
But my mind is not yet up to the task. I'm distracted by the crappy stock market and my car's dangling muffler pipe and by dating being so damned crazy and by insomnia and by my incomplete tax return and by the accompaniment for the musical that opens in 3 weeks that I haven't yet learned and by my cluttered apartment with cereal crumbs on a floor that hasn't been swept in 6 weeks. My mind is going to have to get focussed on those 26.2 miles, somehow, because otherwise the aching and paining is going to insist I stop before I finish.
Enter Mike Huckabee: former governor of Arkansas, Republican presidential candidate. One of both my favorite and least favorite people. Former very overweight gentleman-turned-weight loss advocate. Profiled by A.J. Jacobs in a recent edition of Esquire magazine, which I read while coming home on the train last night. To wit:
Today Mike Huckabee is my favorite person. Because I am totally going to plagiarize his idea. It is 13 days until the marathon. I can certainly begin to focus on the race by thinking of 2 important people a day (a good practice in its own right) and asking them which mile they'd like. In fact, I could probably think of 2 people per mile....."Huckabee has run four marathons. How'd he do it?
'I made a list of twenty-six people who had made a special difference in my life in some way,' Huckabee says. 'I dedicated a mile to each one and I told them in advance — mile thirteen is yours, mile twenty-one, and so on.'Then I put their names on a little card, and I laminated it so it wouldn't get destroyed in the sweat. You just can't quit, 'cause you would be choking on somebody's mile and you'd have to go back and tell them.'
Which should, I hope, take the mind off the aches and pains.
1 comment:
Very cool idea. sometimes I think about things I want to write while running and compile whole stories. Suddenly the miles have gone by and I haven't even noticed it. Kind of like running on auto pilot.
However, you can probably tell by the lack of writing on my blog that I haven't been running much lately. Mostly short runs and mostly speed work, which requires too much of my brain power to focus on anything else.
The darned heat and pollen have been sucking the energy right out of me. Today it is a beautiful 65 degrees (after a record 92 yesterday). I can't wait to get out and have a good run tonight.
I hope the aches and pains subside or at least that the adrenaline of race day will mask most of them.
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