The pain is minor. It's just a pinch at the top of my hamstring that feels like a muscle pull. It hasn't been obnoxious even if it arrived unannounced and lingered for a day before it slowly started to nag. It hasn't even been hanging around long enough to even make me consider consulting with the Dr. S.C. Connally School of Medicine at Google University, let alone panic-dial a real MD.
I do not stop running. Slow down? Yes. Take longer walks between intervals? Maybe. Stretch a little longer and more often once I get home? You bet.
I've felt this before. Lots of times. I'd call it a grade one tear that Rest, Ice, Compression, and Elevation should take care of in a couple of days. It's the same direction a real doctor once gave me right before she suggested I run in a serpentine fashion on a less busy roadway.
Not that I do that. It's crazy enough to be running every day on the same roads, I'm not sure I could handle the stares (let alone the beeping of car horns) were I to slither from one side to the other.
I blame the roads, especially where they heave in the center, having succumbed to the forces of the universe and four seasons of weather, which conspire to make a runner's one hip work harder than the other.
I am almost at the end.
I will lay on the floor later and think about this as I perform leg lifts and deep knee bends and side angle lunges. I don't know for sure if any of these exercises help me, but they don't seem to be hurting any. Unless you count my pride when a kid of mine will ask if I need help to my feet as they stumble across me accidentally.
They probably guess that I will be the proverbial Old Woman who will lay there for days, not wanting to admit that she's found herself in a pickle. They check on me now and again just for practice.
Maybe it's all the groaning I do during transitions: going from standing to sitting, sitting to standing ... or just the act of thinking about kneeling. Standing up from the position takes more thought, surely, but it doesn't take an assist. Not yet.
Truth is, the best years are coming. That's what a recent story in the New York Times said anyway, as it refers to runners who get their starts later in life.
They have mounds of statistics and data to back up such claims, of course. But I'd believe it without a shred of proof.
I speak for myself when I say, we older folks are grateful for just being able to put one foot in front of the other; our goals aren't that high. This starting from zero and getting incrementally faster is the polar opposite of what my track star friends seem to experience.
At some point, though, we all meet our apex. That highest point in the journey, where we look out over the top and marvel at the majesty before we turn around and make our way back down.
Some of us don't recognize it and fail to take a few extra moments to take it all in.
I'm not sure where I am on that journey, but I know to mark the milestones. Today I finished 365 days of consecutive running, amounting to fourteen-hundred-and-forty-five miles during the course of one year; at every time in the day, in every sort of weather. I ran through shin splints and blisters and headaches and allergies. I ran through local streets and unfamiliar cities. I ran around my pool as my kids doused me with water soakers just to keep the streak going.
And as I stand here on this mountain looking down at my accomplishment, I'm filled with gratitude and a sense of completion. Enough of each to stop, on my own terms, without injury, and without regret. And rest.
And for anyone out there starting their streak again, I hope that the road rises to meet you just as gently.
No comments:
Post a Comment