The Streak is Over

And on the 43^rd day, I rested.

The run-streak officially ended after 42 days.  My injured leg just seemed unable to heal under the constant pounding of daily runs, and so I decided to do what I had to do and take a rest.  A full week of rest.

I was completely bummed; borderline depressed, really.  I thought I could do the elliptical, but the pain kicked up then, too.  Maybe it was just annoying pain, but I just couldn’t risk injuring it further.  

Initially, I refused to let this injury bring me down, and I attacked my week off with and appetite for success and thirst for improvement.

Wait… I’m getting confused.  Actually, I attacked the week with an appetite for Chinese food and a thirst for local craft beers.

The week off was extremely unkind.  I have lost my grip on diet and stopped weighing myself and counting calories altogether.  It has completely thrown me off-track.  This isn’t a reset-type thing.  It’s just me, sitting here wondering if I’ll be able to train for my half-marathon in March and whether or not my goals for the NYC Marathon in November are pretty much shot at this point.

Even if I recover my motivation, I’ll be hesitant to push myself over the next few weeks.  Any time I sense a tweak in my leg, I’ll wince and think the worst:  I’ve re-injured it.  Even now I sit at my desk and focus on the leg.  Is that the way it always feels or is that a tiny bit of pain I sense?  I flex my ankle, my calf, rub the shinbone where the stress fracture is… I’m probing for pain.  Is that pain?  I don’t know.  I don’t think so.  At least I’m not limping, so that’s good.  

I started on the exercise bike this past Monday.  I’ve taken to it well enough and my leg hasn’t seemed to experience any kind of additional pain from it.  

But I haven’t gotten my good diet habits back.  I know because I can’t pass the “leftover sandwiches in the breakroom” test.  There are a lot of meetings held in my office and leftover sandwiches are almost a weekly occurrence.  When I’m in a good mode, I barely even hear the clarion call for feeding time.  It’s in-one-ear and out-the-other and I barely budge from my seat.  But when I’m not in diet mode, I run people over like Marshawn Lynch to get to the sandwich platter.

I know that the only way I'm going to get back into my January form is by getting back into the right frame of mind.  I temporarily lost that frame of mind when I took my week off.  And while I may have gained a few pounds, in retrospect, the week off certainly seems to have helped my leg heal.  And in the short-term, that was the most important thing.  Healing remains the most important thing.  I just have to accept it, slowly increase my exercise load with low-impact cardio and hope that come March 20, I can stand at the starting line of the NYC Half and make it 13.1 miles.