Just Don't Get Injured 2

Long, long ago, back in my first running life, one of my friends took me aside and said: “Jay, you are a nice guy and all, but nobody really wants to listen to you go on and on and on about your running injuries”  It was only at this point it dawned on me why at various social gatherings people kept backing away and avoiding conversation with me, and why I couldn’t find a girlfriend    

Since that long ago time I have told myself not to torture people with the excruciating tedious accounts of all my running injuries.  

Moreover I have strived to maintain a positive mindset and tell myself I feel 100%.  Voicing complaints and dwelling on various aches and pains therefore seems counter-productive.  And anyway, I really, really don’t like to feel like I am making excuses for my lousy races.  It is tempting for me to start whining about how if only I could run as much mileage as various other guys, I could be sooooo fast. But then I remind myself that I am extremely fortunate to be able to run and enjoy the activity at all, and anyway I can think of 10 guys who would be way, way better than me if they were in turn not hampered by their injuries.  

So I go to great effort to censor myself about running injuries:   

• Every week when I arrive at my interval workout and a teammate greets me with a friendly “How are you doing?”  I reflectively start to reply: "I feel like crap - my hip and hamstring are so tight and my achilles is still in pain and my upper body is sore from the swim session”.  But as words start to come out of my mouth, I manage to catch myself and say “Great!  How are you doing?”  

• This is the 330th post in the Greater Perrinville Blog, most of them race stories, and it seems like I have started out wanting to preface each and every race story with some long, detailed account of how my training leading up to the event was compromised by some combination of hip, achilles, ITB, knee, calf, back, hamstring, heel, or foot pain. But for most part I have managed to avoid discussion of run injury.  Sometimes avoiding injury discussion to the point that it is absolutely weird - for example in the recent Angkor Wat 10k post I just ignore the central story entirely — why did I stop racing at 7k and walk the last 3k?  

• Recently a teammate commented: “Jay, it is impressive how you are never injured” – I thought this an amusing comment since I am essentially ALWAYS injured – if they would run behind me and they would notice that I essentially limp every step that I take.  

• At the Vietnam Mountain Marathon, I availed myself of the post-race therapy, and the  physical therapist asked me: “So how long has your hip being bothering you”.  “Oh, I guess since May" I replied guardedly.  "Oh, not so long then", he says. I had to admit to him:   "Well, actually when I said May, I mean May of 1980, so I guess that is a bit of a long time...."   In fact I don't know what it is like for my hip area to not feel slightly unbalanced -- it started feeling funny shortly after I first started running competitively -- back when Jimmy Carter was US president and has never really been 100% in the decades since. 

Only now, after the discouraging string of injury issues that have plagued me since last summer have I felt compelled to rant at length about these injuries and risk alienating any poor person who happens to be reading this blog.  

As I said in the last post, at my advanced age the whole game is increasingly about avoiding injury - so I have been adhering to a more steady, training routine.  But that is not the only thing I am doing to avoid injury: 

1. As always I am trying as best I can to "listen to my body
2. Do my strength sessions
3. Cross-train
4. Stretch - After all the controversy, I am back in the stretching camp 
5. Avoiding marathons -- Lately I don't dare even sign up for a HALF-marathon - let alone a full marathon - for the time being, the 10k is my longest race.  I feel I can either handle short and faster (up to 10k), or long and slower (longer trail races with a variety of terrain).  It is the combination of both fast and long that has been problematic --  blasting through a city marathon has felt simply wrong.    
6. Walking home midway through recent run when calf pain flared up