After a full night's sleep I actually felt pretty decent this morning. Good energy, mentally and physically, and ready to go enjoy the crisp fall air. Figured I'd head out for my normal Saturday run as planned before Maia and her mother (she's visiting from Denver) woke up.
I took a few steps, and while attempting to find a rhythm, just couldn't take my mind off my right leg. It's feeling a little chewed up again, and strangely I also had some pretty sharp pain in my right heel. All this was enough to cause me to come to a full stop after 5 minutes, turn off my route, and walk home.
So I'm sitting here, caught between feelings of defeat and relief, not really sure what's going to happen next. What I do know is that my leg will require some more rest to fully recover. This doesn't fit very well into my plan to run a marathon next weekend, and I'm digesting that.
The relieving part of all this is that I don't feel like I have to run. If I hadn't been dealing with this leg issue for a few weeks already, if I'd been just a little bit more consistent over the past month (with everything - mileage, intensity, sleep), and if I wasn't feeling so sluggish (I know, it's normal during a taper), then maybe I would be more apt to push things a little more. But the truth is that I've been struggling a bit, and there's been an undercurrent of doubt during the whole buildup to this point. In a sense I hate when these prophecies of mine become self-fulfilling, and maybe I need to figure out how to flip the doubt into confidence (I do feel like I did that for Grandma's). On the other hand, maybe it's intuition, and I need to be more attuned to that.
Not sure what all this means for next week. I'm in a reduced mileage mode, and to treat this as a recovery period just feels like the right thing to do (duh). MCM would have been my final crack at a marathon until 2013, as I have some other things going on next year, including a wedding, that will take priority.
So, it's looking like one marathon will have been enough for me this year. It's been a hard thing to accept, and I'm struck at how much of a grievance process there's been. I'm hoping not to lose touch here (on this blog) as there's the curiosity of where my entries will go outside of a training focus. Beyond that, only time will tell.
We do all these runs, cover all this ground for a single opportunity to perform well, a mere stitch in the fabric. But the fabric remains, and for that I am glad.
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