The sport of running is ripe for those of us with OCD tendencies. One of the wonderful things about running is that it is quantifiable in so many ways – miles, pace, time, speed, calories burned, hill incline, you name it. When I’m healthy and in good training form, I’ll even create spreadsheets to analyze and track all of this data. Sometimes I can’t wait to get off the treadmill and get to my computer to type in the miles and my pace to see how it stacks up to previous runs.
That is my OCD – speed and distance, one run at a time. I constantly want to run longer and faster than I did the day before. Unfortunately, this may have also led to my downfall.
Starting this past January, I went to the gym every day at lunch for a 40-minute treadmill run, which conveniently put me right around the 4-mile mark as I finished. So I would run 4 miles, record the time and enter it in my spreadsheet to compare it to my previous record. Essentially, recording my runs every day made me want to race myself every day. Even before getting to the gym, I would plot my treadmill pace – from my starting point through all of the subsequent faster intervals so that I could run just a little bit faster than I did the day before. Some days I would be forced to slow down or give up early. But on most days, I’d eek out a new record by a few seconds and be proud of my hard work.
And maybe that’s where I went wrong.
I have pinpointed a number of factors when it comes to my stress fracture and how it happened. But perhaps the one that is most obvious is that every day for over a month, I got on that treadmill and gave it everything I had. And while in theory it may sound like tremendous dedication and focus, in practice it likely helped lead to my injury.
I spent most of the next month wallowing in self-pity. I ate and gained a little weight. I tried to make up for my lack of running by riding the bike or getting on the elliptical, but I wasn’t into it. I knew I wasn’t into it. It just wasn’t the same.
On Monday, I got back on the treadmill at lunch for the first real time. What I immediately sensed was how much I had missed it. Even treadmill running. There is just something so beautifully simplistic about it. You don't think our cavemen ancestors ellipticalled after the wooly mammoths they were hunting, do you? Is that even a thing?
What I am looking for now is a new way to focus my OCD-tendencies when it comes to running. Something that won't cause me to race every day and get injured again, but will keep me focused and training. Some people channel their OCD through the run-streak. Once you get a good one going, you will do just about anything to make sure it continues. My friend Ed2 just focuses on overall miles. He doesn't push his speed every day, though his minimum speed would still run laps around me at my fastest. He doesn't even like racing, because to him it's not about how fast he can do it or how far he can go at one time, but rather the build-up of overall miles. He obsesses over it from the moment he wakes up until the moment he falls asleep, he just wants to log as many miles as he can.
I don't know if that's the answer for me. I don't know that the run-streak is the answer either. All I can tell you is that now it is Tuesday night and after two days of very slow four-mile runs, my stress fracture is hardly bothering me at all. My quads are sore as hell, though, after not running for over a month. I'm hoping that will work it's way through by Sunday when I run the NYC Half. We'll see how that turns out, but I'm looking forward to getting through it, collecting another medal for Sam, hoping the stress fracture doesn't come back, and then returning to a more scripted and predictable training schedule where I don't race myself every single day. I just have to find a new way to obsess over it.
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