some notes on my butt

I am ONCE AGAIN sidelined with a random running injury.  Let us list my athletic medical history!

1. Runner's knee. They crackle to this day. Impressively.
2. Achilles tendonitis. I had to wear running shoes to and from the statehouse in Maryland and then stand in the lobby and awkwardly put heels on while trying not to make eye contact with any of the politicians. It was fashionable and not awesome.
3. BENIGN LEG TUMOR (my personal favorite). That shit is still in there, being benign and never ever hurting, except for that one time when I was training for a half marathon and it decided to hurt all the time and scare everyone. Here it is in all its glory:

It's that huge black thing wrapping around the bone. It looks scary, but it literally does nothing but sit there. Kind of like me right now, which brings us to:
6. Some butt thing idk. I would be more specific, but a team (A TEAM!) (but decidedly not the A-team) of physical therapists has no idea what's going on. I think it's piriformis syndrome, which is a fancy way of saying that I've somehow pissed off a muscle deep inside my butt, but the doctors can't agree on anything. To "recover," I'm basically half-assing a bunch of PT exercises that don't seem to help or hit the correct spot. Some days it hurts, some days it doesn't. I'm friends with ice packs and heating pads and ibuprofen and whining. Standard. (My poor boyfriend, y'all. I am lucky that he is the sweetest.)

Us and my butt, in happier running times.

In the mean time, I'm not quite sure what to do with myself, aside from canceling my registration for the marathon I was going to do in June. Registering for races and then not getting to run them is totally becoming my jam. I think I will get a second opinion from a doctor who maybe knows what he's doing. I think I will try to bike, I guess, but that hurts my extremely bony butt in a whole other kind of way, which seems to sort of defeat the purpose.

On the plus side, I am relatively sure that there is not a tumor in my butt. Though I guess that would be the logical progression of my life.

That time I ran a half-marathon pain-free. I remember you fondly,

on account of you were a month ago.

Edited to add: existing tags I added to this post include "ow my butt," "it's not a toomah," "sadness and woe" and "these tags are ridiculous." Just. What.

Accessorizing

My browser (Firefox) saves descriptions of the recent pages I've used, so now every time I type in Blogger the "currently unavailable" shows up in the box and I'm all, "UGH AGAIN?!" And then I get here and it's fine. Thanks a lot, Firefox.

I finally had a good training run yesterday :) I did 5 miles in 43 minutes and felt fantastic, except for my hamstrings, which were still tight and sore from Saturday's race. I need to buy more ice packs so I can ice multiple areas of my person at one time rather than icing one, then throwing the pack back in the freezer so I can ice a different part later, only to forget about it because I am too busy watching Family Guy on Netflix.



I decided, though, that I really do need new shoes. I decided this after carefully examining the treads, or lack thereof, on the bottom of the soles, and also by the fact that my benign leg tumor is hurting all the time lately. I don't think new shoes will actually help the tumor pain - bitch just whines in protest whenever I start training for a long race, then stops hurting when I see a doctor about it - but maybe I am wrong. Who knows. Then to warm up for the trip to the running store I went online and bought a RoadID. This one:



But in yellow, because I prefer things in obnoxious colors if I have the option. I figured a RoadID was a good idea as I run alone 99 percent of the time and have a general tendency toward falling down and getting myself into ridiculous situations. It will also come in handy if I get lost on any other race courses and pass out from rage and hunger before authorities notice I am gone/find me. You will notice there is a space on the bottom to put an inspirational quote or saying. Here were the choices I considered:

"Don't move to Virginia" - helpful advice for the medical professionals who find me
"Little Kate is a star" - song lyric I love
"Vodka and cheese, stat" - easiest way for them to revive me

In the end I went with "Just one more mile!" Since I will be wearing this thing on every run and hopefully will not be dying/falling down on most of them, I thought it would make more sense to look at something optimistic and running-related rather than to, say, ponder my hatred of the Commonwealth or get a relatively slow song stuck in my head.

I was prompted to order my RoadID by an email from Active.com with a coupon in it. The discount code is pcLevi5 and will save you 10 percent on your purchase. It's good through June 5, and every $20 you spend on the site gets you an entry to win a trip to the Tour de France. So go shop and win a trip to Paris and feel free to invite me, I hear they like cheese and wine there. And if you get one, please tell me what you put in your "motivational saying" line. (And no, RoadID didn't pay me anything to plug them, I'm just liking the bracelets. Like running jewelry! Only not.)

sometimes, not always

I forgot to add one thing to my list of "you should know's" regarding my blog which is this: I am not a write-every-day type of blogger. And probably I never will be, unless someone decides to sponsor my blog and pay me lots of money to write ridiculous things from my bed while I wear pajamas. I just get all twitchy if I start thinking of it as something I Have To Do every day, and also I am not interesting seven days a week. Tuesdays are boring and sometimes I take naps on Thursdays. It's just a fact.

Since my last post I have run twice. The first was indoors at the gym - 4 miles in 35 minutes flat, 6.5 starting speed, 8.1 ending - and the second was today, OUTSIDE, in the BALMY 32 degrees weather. My ears were very excited to be muff-less in the great outdoors for the first time in a month; my quads were less jazzed about the hills we encountered. It went okay, and I felt happy to be out again. I did 3.23 miles in 27:49, which is an average pace of 8:21, thus proving my theory that treadmill training will make you fast but it will also make you a big fat hill wuss. Since it's supposed to drop back into arctic temperatures next week, I am contemplating some treadmill hill workouts. I'm not sure how effective they are but it is probably better than nothing, so we'll see.

Because I don't listen to music when I run outside, I always gear up for my runs with a dance party in my bedroom. I do this with the door closed lest anyone wander past and see me, because I dance like a freak. Like this:


Except instead of joining in my cats just look at me with sadness and pity. Today's warm-up song was "Raise Your Glass" by Pink which morphed into "Teenage Dream" by Katy Perry while I was running. I then spent a good chunk of my run contemplating how pop music all sounds the same to me now, which I believe officially makes me about 86 years old.

Kindred spirit.

I was chatting with my blogging bff Melissa the other day (we go way back, like to the days of livejournal), and she pointed out that I had never explained my reasons for choosing to run the Little Rock Half. They are simple and boil down to this girl:
That is my bff, who I affectionately refer to as the Baby Giraffe due to her gangly awkwardness. She is living in Little Rock for the year with her husband, Cute Comm Boy (so named because I mildly stalked him in my sophomore year communications class), and suggested that we run the race together as a bonding thing. The giraffe weighs 10 pounds and could cut you with her hipbones and as such has never run a half marathon, which frightens me a little because I fear she may break in half right in front of me en route, and I can't sew or do CPR so I will be of no use if/when this happens. She has had the flu and has spent the past week or so vomming, and before that I think was right around my awesome running benchmark of 4 miles, so it remains to be seen how this whole half-marathoning-in-the-name-of-friendship will go. Because in case you have forgotten, allow me to remind you that the race is

36 days

away. And yes that did fill my heart with fear and panic when I typed it.

Obviously I do not have any grand GOALS for this race, although I would like to beat the time from my last half, which was 2:13. My training for that one was very on point until I went to the doctor for what I thought might be a stress fracture and left being told it was a "shadowy mass," most likely a tumor. My tumor sucked. I named her Phyllis, she was a wench. She looked like this:


The fugly whore is technically still in my leg, hanging out, and since it never changed shape or grew the doctors didn't see a need to biopsy it, and declared it benign ("enchondroma" is Phyllis' full name, if you are into the Google). But while they were discussing all of this I was told to stop running, so by the time the half rolled around my long run consisted of a single 4.5-miler. I was running the race with my dad, who has been a runner longer than I've been alive and has done Boston twice, and he was very kind to me when I hit the wall at mile 9. But I didn't walk once and still managed some semblance of a sprint into the chute, and of course I didn't lose my sense of humor or powers of persuasion, as some time around mile 7 I managed to talk my dad into doing this for one of the course photographers:

Why yes, I am racing in a cotton T-shirt.

So really my goal here is to get in at least one long run of about 8 miles and finish faster than my tumor time of 2:13. I think it's doable, especially since the giraffe told me to feel free to ditch her after the first mile. I don't know how likely that is, on account of I like her, but I am glad to have the option. And since I won't be listening to music on the course, I already have my pump-up strategy all planned out. It basically involves playing this on a loop in my head:

FOOLPROOF!

Edited to add: I just reopened this post to let you know that I cannot watch that video without dissolving into laughter. I have yet to make it through one time. I am a dork.