Speculating on Spectating
I was glad that I had to work this morning rather than watch the Mini 10K and not be able to run. I guess I would have been capable of jogging the six miles, but it would be a strange mental disconnect for me to run in a race, without actually racing it. I could have asked off to go cheer for the other runners, but I think I felt better just being as far away from it as possible. When I first felt those early twinges in my back more than a month ago, I never would have guessed that I'd still be injured now, but it is what it is and it's probably fortunate that I have enough other crises and emotional traumas in my life at the moment that I haven't spent much time pondering what might have been.
I'm regretfully, but definitively, giving up the fool's errand of attempting to train for a 2:47 marathon. It was unlikely that I would have survived several months of 90+ weeks without some sort of injury anyway, but now there's simply not enough time to get back up to speed to even attempt that kind of work load. At this point I'm leaning against even trying to train for a fall marathon and instead am pondering the idea of going up to Boston next Spring to enthusiastically spectate at the trials and participate in the regular marathon (which will be conveniently bereft of all those speedy sub 2:47 girls).
I'm continuing to stretch and rest and I've been jogging four miles conservatively a few times a week and gradually, that amorphous ache in my back and hip is slowly starting to dissipate. I'm almost entirely certain that my injury is entrenched within my nervous system and muscular tissue, so if I described it in a way that made it sound like a stress fracture, I probably just didn't describe it very well.
The interesting thing for me now will be to see whether or not my injury thing continues to improve. Just to see how it made me feel, I've tried to imagine a world where I was only comfortably capable of running 3 or 4 miles at 9:30 pace, 3 or 4 times a week. The routine of having that alone time in the park, just me and my thoughts and my breath and the beat of my heart, the cycles of the weather and the seasons and the light.... I've learned to value those things in a way I never did for all the years I only trained haphazardly and sporadically and I do think I would continue with that kind of running as part of my life. But I don't honestly know if I would continue to race. I just don't see the point of paying the entry fees and subjecting myself to the crowds when I'm not capable of producing any results that come even close to the times I was running just six months ago. I've always said that the whole reason I run is to race and if I couldn't race, I wouldn't run, but it's kind of gratifying to realize that perhaps that isn't actually true.