Dear Hamstring,

Hey buddy, how's it going? I think it's time you and I had a heart to heart. I don't speak fluent "Hamstring" so you'll have to forgive me, I'll try my best.

I know you've been going through a lot lately and you might not understand what all has been happening to you. I realize that asking you to run a marathon with me in 4 days is really asking a lot. Please know that I don't take your trepidation lightly, I'm scared too. I think we both know that neither of us are prepared to do this thing and we both are well aware that this is going to hurt. But we can do this. Well.... we are doing this. Whether or not we really can remains to be seen.

So here's where I'm asking for your help. I know this isn't ideal, it may not even be smart. I'm not asking you to break any records (but I don't want to rule anything out....hint, hint). All I can really, truly ask of you is that you do not have a major structural failure during (or after....or before) the marathon. I see this as a win/win for both of us. I mean, let's face it. A complete mechanical breakdown would only hurt us both. Nobody wins there.

Maybe you're appalled. I would expect that. I mean, I would be too if I were in your shoes. Lord knows you've been through enough lately. But what I'm asking here is that, well, that you just man up. I hope that doesn't offend you, I certainly don't mean to be crass. I just really need for you to hold yourself together for a few more days. After all this is over, I promise to let you rest, I will treat you well and when you're feeling up to it, we'll grow strong together. We'll maintain open communication with each other and I'll be open to any suggestions you might have. I won't rush you or try to push you into doing something you don't want to do.

So...just this once. Please? Afterwards I promise to play nice.

Thanks for understanding.

Love, Me.

P.S. You've been doing great lately! Looking good, keep it up!

P.P.S. Sorry, I don't know what to do about the shoe thing.

P.P.P.S. If you could somehow let me know whether you do or do not appreciate ice, that would be great. Like blink once for yes, twice for no or something. Thanks. I'll leave you alone now.

Flinch

Two quotes I've come across recently have really made me take a second look at myself. One of them I found on the internet: "It's not who you are that holds you back, it's who you think you're not". The other was said to me by a friend: "Carrie, you're not the person you think you are." And then she proceeded to back it up with proof.

Something that came up recently made me realize that I may be living my life under the notion that I don't deserve to have beautiful things in my life. And by things, I don't mean objects, possessions.

Everybody has a certain amount of darkness in them. I don't think there's a single person out there who can look inside themselves-their heart, mind, soul, whatever- and not find some ugliness.

Like it or not, we're all formed by our experiences and our past. As far as we come away from all that, as far as we may rise above it, we always carry some piece of it along with us.

I've had my fair share of ugliness in my life and situations that have certainly left a permanent stain, and in some instances, scars. Other people may not see it, but I can see my own ugliness. I think we all can.

"We each need to make peace with our own memories. We have all done things that make us flinch." -Surya Das.

So why would I ruin a beautiful person by allowing them into my life? What if that beauty becomes smudged because they witness some of my ugliness? What if they are crushed by the weight of my burdens?

I believe the answer I've been giving myself is simply that you just don't. Instead you allow people into your life who treat you less than beautifully. Because then you won't have to worry about ruining them with your darkness.

Even the most beautiful people are made up of a portion of ugliness. I think the important thing is to try to treat people as beautifully as possible and remember that we are all fragile and have a point at which we will break.We are as deserving as how well we treat others- not the beauty or ugliness of the substance we are made of.

12 miles...who needs taper?

Today was the ultimate test of my ability to run the Boston Marathon. Ideally I would've done a 15 miler, but I've been sick with the flu and my snapping tendon slowed down my return to running. I figured 12 miles would be sufficient. After that it's all mental anyway, right? Eerrg.

The weather was overcast and cool, perfect for a run. I wore my new fuel belt even though I only had to carry two packets of Gu. Better to get used to it than try something new on race day.

The rest of the world is in a full on taper at this point, and I would've been too. I love taper. I love that my perfect taper for a marathon is 3 weeks. Three glorious weeks of not working nearly as hard or running nearly as long, in order to rest up and take full advantage of my training for the big day. Well you can't taper down from zero.

The first two miles I had to keep slowing myself down, it felt great.

Mile three I started to feel tired. Fatigue is largely in your head. Or a byproduct of the flu. Nope, in your head. You're making it up.

Mile 4 and 5 I tried to lose myself without success. I was still holding back from striding out since I was unsure how my body would tolerate the large upswing in mileage. I took a Gu with one more mile to go before the turn around.

As I headed towards home I felt a little surge of energy....either the Gu or the thought of just having to get home and be done. Only six miles to go. Yeee...not a good way to view it. I turned my mind off.

I listened to the thump of my feet, uneven and loud. I felt the nagging pain on my achilles tendon that's been bugging me since I tore my hamstring. I tried to relax, listened to the rhythm of my breathing. My pace quickened as I felt that familiar need to be done. I let myself go the last two miles and finally managed to lose myself. The world went away and my legs did their own thing. They know what to do, they don't need me to micromanage them.

As I slowed to a walk when my Garmin beeped at 12 miles, my cough started up again and seized my body with each one. My hope is that that goes away before Boston.

When I got home I stretched and rolled out my muscles on the foam roller. I iced a couple places on my leg: the hamstring and Fred. It feels fairly good, just slightly sore. I'll run a few more times this week and fly to Boston on Saturday.

If you go on Boston's website they'll have a link to follow my race. I guess it updates it every 3 miles or so. You can see where I keel over, it'll be fun. Either search by my name or put in bib number 16802-that's me! My group starts at 10:25 am, eastern time.

I realize it's going to take a lot of mental and physical toughness to get through this with my lack of training, but I've pulled through before, I can do it again! The experience is going to be amazing, and today during the toughest part of my run I started thinking about the people who lost legs at last year's bombing, and they're running this thing. I don't think I have any right to complain. People have greater struggles than I do.

Procrastinating

Today is Friday, which means several things. 1) It's Friday. 2) No school for the next two days. 3) I am now totally overloaded with work because I was a total shit show all of last week. 4) While I now have 2.5 days to accomplish everything I need to, I will begin all of them Sunday night at 6pm and declare that I am exhausted and overwhelmed. I will take multiple naps all weekend long. And a couple hot baths.

Immediately after being released back to running with a freshly healed hamstring, I came down with what was probably the flu. Apparently you do not generally become delirious during a cold. I have also developed an obnoxious cough that has left my ribs feeling bruised and my stomach muscles forming a more washboard pattern...except they feel like they've been raked over a washboard.

I considered the issue of needing to rest while simultaneously upping my mileage for the Boston Marathon. It is amazing what you can do after overloading your body with tylenol, sudafed, mucinex, albuterol and coffee.

On Wednesday I had to report back to my physical therapist. She was concerned to find that I had no voice. While I croaked out my report of my doctor clearing me to run, my runs during the week, and any remaining issues (snapping turtle, Fred....oh crap. Forgot to tell her it has a name. Anyway...) she listened intently. As I told her about my 5 miler, she broke in "Hopefully before you got sick"....

"Um, well...no...during..."

She made a face.

"What am I supposed to do?!" I asked, feeling utterly helpless. Just last week she had sternly told me I needed to get my mileage up.

She laughed. I was in for some deep tissue massage.

So all week I have struggled not to die, gone to classes and done a few runs. No where in there did I find the motivation to study. Ugh.

Today I've been feeling a little better and decided to catch up on a lot of things. After class I went and made another therapy appointment, paid my fees from the last two, went and got stamps (that's been on my list for about 3 weeks now), came home and had a snack, and went for a run.

Apparently that was about all I had in me. I took a hot bath and a nap, managed to crank out a math quiz, then opened my binder to take inventory of what was left to do. Dear god.

A jumbled weather map sits on top and I am supposed to trace the frontal boundaries of air masses. Meerr, what else is there?

Ooh, here we go...chapters 8 and 9 questions. Well since I've read neither chapter....what else?

My research paper. Ha!

Study for the math exam that is going to be two days after returning from Boston. Oh man....

Do your math homework.

You could have a load of laundry going while doing one of these things.... Son of a gun. Isn't there something I should be looking at on Pinterest?

Pretty sure I need to eat again....and do the dishes...and clean my room. This is going nowhere fast. I'm going to eat and decide from there.

The Unit Circle

I could've sworn I had something more interesting to write about the other day (maybe that yesterday morning when I attempted to shout profanities at at fellow driver, I discovered I had completely lost my voice from this nasty cold/flu thing I've got...splendid for the other driver), but I've completely forgotten it. So today I'm here to talk to you about the Unit Circle. And just so you know, whenever I am here writing about such nonsense, it is usually because I'm doing my best to procrastinate studying. I do that well. But have no fear because I just got 100% on my last Pre-Calc test...yay!!

So what is the Unit Circle, you might (or might not) ask? Here it is:

Ahh, yes. Nice. But what is it?

You got me, but I've got about a week and a half to figure it out, because that's when the exam is. I mean, I kind of get it. It's a circle with a radius of 1. And all those crazy points around the circle are the coordinates of points that lie on the circle at intervals of radians (not entirely sure what that is, but that's what those fractions of Pi represent). It all stems from the equations of circles. 2(pi)r is the circumference, right? Well, see all those Pi's? Apparently there's a deeper meaning to life. 

Remember sine, cosine, tangent, cotangent, secant and cosecant? Yeah me neither, but they're in there too. You just can't see them. But you have to know them...and their inverses (aaghhh!! inverses!!!).

So in attempt to simplify and find an easy way to memorize the Unit Circle (because we can't use notes or calculators on the exam) I gave Pinterest a little search.Because what better way to distract you from doing what you should be doing than pinning on Pinterest?

I've come to the conclusion that the Unit Circle is a sort of coat of arms for math geeks everywhere. Like the beloved 26.2 for marathon runners, 70.3 for triathletes, a shark fin for surfers (or Shark Finn Soup if you've met her), palm trees for Californians, crosses for Christians, I don't know-like an emblem to represent your tribe. 

They make Unit Circle necklaces. T-shirts and earrings. One dude had a Unit Circle tattoo on his forearm which is quite genius. He must've had my math teacher. Unit Circle clocks and Unit Circle banana cream pie (ha! Get it? Pie?). 

I'm making a genuine effort to fall in love with math. I don't know if you can just make yourself love something, but I'm giving it a shot anyway. But I don't totally love the Unit Circle. I do love the interesting graphs of the trig functions on the Unit Circle (sine waves are fun!). They make for good doodling. 

I feel like there's something there though, like there will be an "aha" moment when the Unit Circle and I finally see eye to eye. Maybe then I'll get myself a Unit Circle tattoo (or not). I feel like I almost had something one day as the instructor drew swirls around the circle and it coincided with repeated sine and cosine graphs, but then I lost it. It went back to being funny numbers on a circular chart. Maybe I'll consult with "The Joy of X" and see if he's got something to say on the Unit Circle. That would help me make sense of it all. 

The other day while researching the Never Ending Storm in Venezuela (Catatumbo Lightning) I came across this amazing photo of volcanic lightning.

Yeah, that's real. Google "volcanic lightning", you get some amazing photos. I think that is quite possibly the most beautiful thing on earth. I would put that on my wall. 

The Unit Circle? Meh...

The Snapping Turtle Reigns On

I had my follow up with my doctor today for my hamstring and I'm pretty sure I will always go to a sports medicine doctor whenever possible. I think they're less cautious than I am. With Boston 17 days away, I was nervous about what he felt about me running it. My therapist is pretty positive about it, except that I really need to increase my mileage. Because the tendon behind my knee continues to snap back and forth very obviously, we were both feeling a little anxious about what the doc would say.

I ran twice yesterday. 2 miles at the therapist's office and one more that night after class. This morning I ran another two. My leg is fairly happy. However, it is not happy when it has to run up hills or jump a curb, so for now I'm limiting my runs to the treadmill. Tomorrow I will run 3, and Sunday I will run 5. If the 5 miler is successful, we're looking very good for the marathon.

The doctor poked and prodded and felt along the length of the muscle and was unable to find either a tear or a painful part. I demonstrated Fred's (the snapping turtle living behind my knee) capabilities for him. Laying on my back, I stuck my leg up in the air and straightened it. One of my hamstring tendons jumped out to the side.

"Hmmm." He grabbed the tendon and felt it while I popped it back and forth. I relaxed and he popped it back and forth a few times. He winced.

He had me squat, then do single leg squats on each leg.

"Well the muscle looks great. That tendon thing, that's a separate issue, obviously caused by the same thing though. That might not go away." Geezo. I'm not talking about a simple little clicking behind my knee. This tendon jumps out of place when I straighten my knee under tension or under a load. This thing is no joke. It's not that it's particularly painful, but it's incredibly disconcerting and it's one of those things I feel would probably hurt if I continued the motion.

We talked about leg strengthening and I told him how I attempted a straight leg dead lift, no weight, just the proper form. When I straightened up, my tendon snapped over and I decided it wasn't a good idea to continue. The doctor shook his head. I wondered what he was thinking but decided not to ask.

"Well that may or may not go away. If it becomes a problem, we can deal with it then. In the mean time, you need to get your mileage up for Boston without re-injuring yourself. This 5 miler is going to be a big decision maker. If you're hurting after that, we've got a problem. But if it's fine, I would get that mileage up. I'm not a running coach so I can't tell you how to do that, but I would want to get that mileage up.

"If you re-injur it, you're not going to be able to do Boston, but if you keep if healthy I think you'll do fine. It may not be your fastest marathon, but you should be ok. Now, if it starts hurting during the marathon, well, do the best you can and we'll fix you when you get back."

I laughed. That's probably the funniest thing a doctor has ever said to me.

"And if the tendon continues to be a problem, we'll address it then."

I just read some research articles and medical papers on this snapping tendon thing. The semitendonosis muscle and tendon sits on top of the semimembranosis, which is the one I injured. My doc thinks I possibly tore the fibers in the tendon that keeps the semitendonosis tendon sliding inline where it should be. It doesn't fix itself by the way.

The articles pretty much said the same thing, except that the only thing that helped these several documented patients (it's apparently very rare behind the knee but can be found more commonly in the hip, shoulder, elbow, etc) was an excising of both the semitendonosis tendon and the gracialis tendon (the gracialis is one of muscles in the groin). Excising? Removing a portion of the tendons. For crying out loud.

So Fred is going to hang out with me for awhile and see how things go. It does mess with my running quite a bit (as well as going upstairs, making right turns, etc) but it's also still new and getting back into the functional phase. So I guess we'll see. I go back to therapy on Wednesday and we'll discuss how my mileage is going and the new info about Fred. My therapist will also appreciate that Fred has a name. Yesterday she man handled my hip flexors and I refused to cry uncle. Actually at some point I may have more or less said "Bring it on". But I guess there's no faking toughness when you cry out and flop back down onto the table, defeated by a simple stretch.

For the love of running

On my early morning flight home from Portland, my plane banked left over the Santa Cruz mountains and I spotted a dirt path running the length of the ridge. I had brief vision of me running on a mountain trail and I wondered if you had to have something taken from you (at least temporarily) to realize how much it means it you.

A couple weeks ago someone said to me "You must really love running". I responded that, actually, I don't. It's complicated really, like most relationships are. On the same topic, someone once said to me that I shouldn't force myself to do something I don't enjoy. But I thought, Quit running? That would be dumb. And I've always wondered how I really felt about running.

Anyone who has sat and listened to me hem and haw while lacing up my shoes would wonder why on earth I continue to do this. My thinking was that if you love doing something, you can't wait to get out and do it. Well... it is not a common occurrence for me to yearn for a run... unless someone has told me I can't.

What I do love is how when I find my stride and get into my groove, my world is both sharpened and blurred at the same time. I take in everything around me: sights, smells, temperature, the breeze, my footsteps, the twinge in my calf, the slope of the path, the runners and cyclists around me, the sound of my breath and the tension in my shoulders. Simultaneously though, everything around me fades away. It's like picking up a clue, examining it closely, then dropping it on the ground and forgetting about it. Take it in, let it go, leave it behind. Often on my runs I can't think back to the miles behind me and remember what they were like. I can't think back to 5 minutes ago and remember my train of thought.

Generally there is a certain peace when I run. Even on the toughest runs. There is peace in suffering if you do it right. Take it in, let it go. Don't dwell on it, don't reminisce. Don't carry your suffering from mile 7 with you to mile 10. You are not in the same place. Let it go, leave it behind with the footprints you left back at mile 7.

Fatigue and pain pounce on me and I feel them, then let go. It fades. Not away. It doesn't go away but I drop it from my mind and see the next thing. The next rise in the path, rock in the way, the next breath, the next shift in my body position. Suffering has taught me to let go.

So maybe I don't enjoy interrupting my peaceful morning of plodding around my house in the dark, drinking coffee and waiting for the sun to rise, in order to go outside to bathe in discomfort. But what I do love about running is finding that on/off switch for all the pain, frustrations, worries, discomfort and anger. When I'm laying in bed at night or sitting quietly on the couch, all those negative things are free to sit with me and hang out in my mind and I'm unable to shut them off or escape. I can't push it behind me like miles run for the day or footprints in the dirt. My love for running is simply that it allows me to let go.