Oops

When you're training for a race - and I am, in case you didn't know - whenever you feel pain, you are always wondering if you're in trouble or if you're just being a baby.

I wondered, at first, if I was just being a baby when I first felt the pain in my left foot. It started hurting after my last 20-mile run a week ago Saturday.

(On a side note, my knee tendonitis began hurting after my first 20-mile run. I guess running 20 miles is tough on your body).

Crap like this is always a part of training for a marathon, so I'm told. It makes sense. After that last 20, I ran 51 miles that week. I'd never really run more than 35, and barely hit that, before I began training for the big one. Aches and pains and even injuries are part of the deal.

But, man. It started really hurting Wednesday, after my intervals session, and then Friday I cut my run short by a mile (the weather made it easy to do that, as it's rained here since that Wednesday and it started raining hard enough as I was running Friday morning to get the Ark unhitched). 

Then Saturday on mile 10, it was kind of screaming at me.

I decided at that point I was no longer being a baby and that this was serious.

I can put up with a lot of pain. In fact my pain threshold is probably too high. There's probably injuries I could have avoided if I had just taken a few days off. But I worry, too, because I know a marathon is 26 miles, and a lot can happen over that distance. Something small can turn into an elephant by the time you cross the finish line. Or don't cross it.

I'm on steroids now, and I'm running twice this week and only twice. The good news is I'm tapering now and can basically take the two weeks off without it affecting me much (which still blows me away but I'm trusting the knowledge of my friends who have done many of these). 

The bad news is just two weeks before the race, I'm dealing with an injury.