Running in my sleep

I dream about running. 

I get dressed in my sleep, tie my shoes, and rapid-eye-move my way through an unfamiliar course where I’m dodging all manner of obstacles: Sprinkler systems, barking dogs, limbs falling off my body. I repeat a number in my head like a mantra -- it's my personal record -- until my joints feel as if they are hardening into concrete. 

The alarm clock comes to my rescue, awakening me to a more realistic but still unwelcome sluggishness. 

It’s been a recurring dream for about a year now, on or about the time an injury took me off course for half marathon training and relegated my running status to a slow walk along the sidelines. 

More of a nightmare, really.

My husband will tell you, it hasn’t been the best year for any of us.

He can describe the way my mouth twists in envy as I sit in the passenger seat and gaze out at the runners dotting the usual roadside paths.

It’s not pretty.

I envy them as they rock their arms and seem to glide along the sidewalk. I crane my neck and contort my body to get a better look at "my competition." For what, I don’t know. My loving spouse thinks I must be secretly chanting some evil spell that will strike the runner at that very moment with some harmless but insurmountable obstacle: Like a cartoon pothole followed by an anvil from the sky.

I’m not wishing harm.

I’m just wishing my body would catch up with my mind and heal itself. 

I went to all the doctors. I had all the tests. They gave me a name of something obscure and unpronounceable but eminently treatable with more time and strength training than seems humanly possible. Of course, it’s something I shouldn’t talk about in polite company since the general location of this non-infectious, inflammatory injury rhymes with “Elvis.”

In six or 104 short weeks I might return to nearly normal.

Lucky me. And lucky anyone asking “how are you feeling,” just to be polite. Runners … especially ones who are sidelined … are nearly incapable of keeping tales of their injuries, and the 47,000 quack-prescribed remedies they’ve tried in an attempt to solve them, to themselves.

“I went to a pelvic physical therapist … you know the kind of treatment you may have heard about in the news by a disgraced Olympic gymnastics doctor, only this is totally legitimate.”

I get a lot of blank stares from my propensity for TMI … but the whole thing has been rather eye-opening. 

It had never occurred to me that the tremendous pain I had been feeling was the result of a muscle imbalance, which may have stemmed from an old c-section scar and an incrementally compensating posture, rather than just the expected over-running and under-stretching.

But in a few sessions, I was beginning to feel better.

Not great, mind you. Not back to normal. Just not as terrible.

And that was apparently enough to start running again.

And slowly, slowly …

… Literally one minute at a time ...

I have begun to run again.

It’s not great. I’m not back to normal, but it’s not terrible. And now when I dream about running it doesn’t feel like such a nightmare.

And that’s a start.