More Whining and a Girl Who Can’t Carry a Yoga Mat

As of right now, I officially have one more self-imposed week of not running. Yesterday a client was asking me about running, and I commented that it’s getting pretty hard to not run, and she thought that was really weird. Obviously it’s not physically hard to not run (unless I’m drunk), but I really miss it, and I’m getting nervous about getting ready for Hood to Coast. Especially since I don’t even know if my knee will actually feel better next week when I try running again.

I miss that brief time when I was little, when being injured was a novel and intriguing experience. Not that I enjoyed getting hurt, but it was always something new and meant you got special attention from parents and sometimes your friends thought it was cool. If you had to go to the doctor, it might not be that great, but it was free, and that part was great. Of course I’m speaking as someone who grew up without many problems, I know there’s lots of kids who grow up with tons of problems and I imagine health issues don’t seem so fun then.

But that time was short-lived anyway. It didn’t take long for getting injured to stop being fun ever, and start making me sad. Sophomore year I got a stress fracture during track, but I tried to be supportive and go to all the meets even though I couldn’t run, and it was really depressing. These days my feelings about injury have evolved into anger. When my body doesn’t work like I think it should, I get really pissed off, especially when it interferes with race plans and other personal goals.

While I never had major health issues growing up, getting hurt from sports is nothing new, therefore it’s no longer exciting in the least. Of course I still love that extra attention my mom gives to my tendons from this ordeal, but nobody else wants to hear about it, and there’s absolutely no way to make tendinitis sound like an exciting injury. It doesn’t even sound like a bad enough problem to keep someone from running, just like a lame excuse to be lazy. The fact that it takes the expertise of a rheumatologist to even tell that anything is swollen doesn’t help either – there is almost no visual evidence that anything is wrong. The prospect of going to another doctor (as in not my mom) or a physical therapist just makes me sad for my bank account.

Of course the one that really suffers when I’m injured is my dog. I’m not really into taking walks, I always get really bored, and it goes so slow. This means that Pascal doesn’t get to have too much exercise, which I know is really bad for him, but he hasn’t complained yet (at least not with English words, which is the only form of complaint I accept). So hopefully next week when I try running again things go well, for both of our sakes. Here’s a picture of Pascal when he was a tiny baby (pay extra attention to how cute he is):

I don’t plan on updating again until I have something to talk about besides being hurt, because really nobody wants to hear about that. I’m all about hearing about other peoples’ injuries and things like that, but I can tell that a lot of people get bored/don’t give a shit. Maybe I’m bad at telling about them. Or I should get more interesting problems than chronic/overuse injuries.

The only exciting running-related thing in my life this week was this girl running to the gym on Holgate a couple of days ago. At least I think she was running to the gym, or more specifically, to yoga class, because she had a yoga mat strapped to her back and it was not working out for her very well. It was flapping all over the place and then completely fell off and she had to stop and fix it. Ever since then I’ve been trying to think of better ways to carry a yoga mat while running. Here’s what I’ve come up with:

1. Tie string to two of the corners and then wear it like a cape.
2. Don’t carry it at all, and skip yoga, because it’s difficult and boring and you’re not good at it.

I actually lied when I implied that I put much thought into this. Mostly I just laughed at her because she looked silly and I was jealous of her for being able to run and how good at yoga she probably is. I should be so lucky.

PS. Murphy: I added a thing where you can check “like” if you like this entry. I know how much you hate commenting when all you want to do is like it.