I Canceled My Marathon

Every single person who has seen me in the last month has said, “Hey, Mette, did you know you’re limping?”

Yes, I know I’m limping. Badly. I’ve been a little lopsided most of the time for the last seven years, but it’s been particularly bad in the last month. Which is why I told myself that I was going to work on being in less pain day by day.

But also I was signed up for a marathon on Saturday and I kept feeling like I needed to do at least a little running, right? To make sure I could finish it.

Then the last couple of days, I started to think about maybe just walking the whole thing. The limping usually gets better once I’ve warmed up a bit and it also hurts a lot less. It’s not just my Achilles, but also my gluteal muscles that I hurt when I did a run a month ago and my body didn’t like it.

I’m frustrated because I had one goal for this year: to be able to run again for stretches longer than a minute or two at once. And I was making some significant progress toward that goal, had run a full hour and then an hour and a half without walking. Then this hit me as if I’m being punished for trying to push too hard. Which, yeah, is a thing that happens to me a lot at this age.

I’ve never pulled out of a race because of injury before. I’ve DNF’d two races, both times where I was injured while in the course of racing. I pulled out of a race once because I didn’t want to race with my ex. But that’s it. I’ve never had to do this before. I didn’t want to do this. And yet . . .

Today, one of my kids used my phone to open the race page for me and showed me where to click to defer my race for next year (and pointed out that there was a race next year, which I thought there wasn’t because I got two races confused). I said I was going to think about it, but then I realized that thinking about it was just me saying that I didn’t want to be forced into giving up. And so I just put in the information and canceled the race.

Did I feel immediate relief? No, not really.

Did I feel immediate sadness and a wave of shame that I may never be able to run a marathon again? No, not really.

I just felt—meh. Maybe my real feelings will trickle in more slowly. I don’t know.

I think I may need to take some time off running for a bit. And it’s possible I have to give it up. I’m trying not to do worst case scenarios quite yet. It’s time to wait and see, and as we all know, this is not my best feature. I’m more of a throw yourself into something and keep going no matter what happens or how badly it hurts. Which is why we’re here where we are. It’s a feature. And a bug.

It's been a really hard week. I had hoped for a new position at work that didn’t come through and I’d let myself imagine NOT working on phones, and that hope being dashed combined with real physical pain to bring me an upsurge in suicidal ideation. I’m fine. I think I’m fine. I’m just super cautious now about noticing when this happens because I know it’s a warning signal that I have to pay attention to.

My trainer talked to me about the issue last week and she said that it sounded like I’d tried everything that she was going to suggest and that sometimes it just doesn’t get fixed. Which was not great to hear but also was maybe what I needed to hear. I don’t control the universe and actually, I don’t even control my body. I am not superwoman nor am I made of steel, despite what some claim about me.

I’d like to do some smaller races this summer, but I haven’t signed up for any yet and I guess that’s a good thing.