Running Tip #5

Things you need to know:

You need to know I’m running my first ½ marathon in two weeks and that in one of my weekly HIIT workouts, doing sit-ups, my back went out. Funny thing is I can run just fine with a bad back. It actually feels better to run than to walk.

The other thing you need to know is that I’m injury prone. I do face plants, roll my ankle etc all the damn time. I'm not proud of this fact. It hurts. No seriously, it really hurts. My last big race I rolled my ankle 12 times and took three face plants and one of said face plants involved snowplowing on my arms with my legs in the air about 20 yards down a hill. That night I spent an hour picking gravel out of my flesh. We call that race The Trail of Tears.

Now Saturday was the last long run before my race and I did everything right. Mostly. I got enough sleep. I had the perfect breakfast. I forgot my leggings but, like I said, I’m scrappy. Anyhow, I ran the first 12 miles brilliantly, avoided injuring myself for 12 hard ass miles but I’m now, at mile 12, I’m spent and we come up on this section of trail where a small gulley has formed in the middle of the trail and its full of rain water from the previous night. I have two choices, in my exhaustion riddled mind, either spend energy running high on the bank or just go through the water.

I’m not sure how far I got down the stream when my foot went down into a cloudy patch of water and just kept going and then it locked out. I spilled hard, a real yard sale. I think I howled. Stephanie said I was Navy SEAL tough to just pop back up and keep running but the truth was the water was freaking ice cold, really ice cold like frostbite burn your skin cold so staying down was not an option and not getting back to the car fast was also not an option. I ran my balls off.

Everything went numb eventually and I finished strong. Wait for it…

… Here’s the tip:

You’re probably thinking the tip is Don’t step into anything you can’t see the bottom of and anywhere else in the running community that would be the tip but not here. The tip is this, sometimes a bad thing like a wrenchingly painful fall can turn out to be a good thing. Don’t get me wrong. I could barely stand after we finished running. I was, in fact, miserable all day because my back hurt so much but the next day and even now my back feels great. I’m not advocating this as an alternative to physical therapy or back cracking but in this case, it worked for me.