Next year
I had one pain free mile this morning. Mile two was great. Mile one was ok, mile three sucked. I walked back as my group ran on to finish their 8 mile loop. All the while, I was telling myself that I’d be fine, I would just ice more and stretch more and take more ibuprofen. I would show up at the starting line and see what I could do. It would be fine.
As the other runners caught up with me at their mile 7 and my mile 5, I realized that there wasn’t going to be a marathon for me this year. Kind runners stopped to make sure I was ok, and I assured them I was. I flashed each person who stopped the best smile I could muster, but as I made my way up the final hill before the parking lot, I felt the tears well up. A kind woman around my mother’s age stopped to check on me. The tears spilled over, and I realized that I had no business lining up at the starting line next weekend. I can’t run 3 miles without pain, why on earth would I even attempt to run 26.2?
You know what sucks? My heart hurts worse than my knee. If it were the other way around, if I didn’t have such a high tolerance for physical pain and a tendency to recoil from emotional pain, maybe not running next weekend would be easier to accept.
