To Next Year

So this week has been different from my last few in that it involved activities at least tangentially related to running.

Usually on Wednesday nights I'm at karate, so the one upside of being too busted for that right now is that I was completely free this past Wednesday to go see Spirit of the Marathon II with A.

Takeaways:

1) Totally agree with Redhead Running that running a marathon with "Pizza Runner" would be awesome.

2) I could never ever ever ever EVER run a race with the purple shirt woman. She seems like a lovely person off of a race course, but honestly I think I would have strangled her by mile 4.

3) I could probably never be in a feel-good inspirational running movie because I have no Story.

I had to keep reminding myself that no, every person in the movie was not actually personally mocking me with their ability to run and no, hating them for it was not actually going to heal my leg faster.

Unrelated to running, Don & I went to one of our favorite SF cocktail bars Friday night with friends & had a great time, after which I came home & ate half of a giant al pastor Mission burrito mojado.

Drinking.

Eating. I may not be running right now but I can still fuel with the best of them.

Then on Saturday I dragged myself out of bed at 11:00am to head over the SF Marathon expo.

To be honest, for the last three weeks I've been secretly hoping some sort of miracle would happen, and I would wake up one morning before June 16 with my leg completely healed and able to get me to the finish of the "2nd Half" half marathon I've been looking forward to for months.

This has not happened. While it has been incredibly slowly but surely getting better (I can walk like a mile with no pain! I can get in & out of cars without my hip exploding!), I'm a loooooong way from anything that even resembles running (still can't go up/down steps or do a single-leg squat without insane pain).

Bum leg or not, however, I was still owed a shirt, sweat bag, & beer ticket, dammit, so off I want. (And of course, as is pretty much always the case with SFM, I have a bunch of friends running & wanted to drop by the meet-up that was happening and say hi to everyone.)

I also wanted my bib, for reasons I can't completely explain.

[WARNING: light to moderate melodrama ahead]

In general too much woe-is-me blog-wallowing is one of those things I just CANNOT abide, so I beg your indulgence for the next couple of paragraphs. I'll try to keep it brief.

This is my first "real" DNS, the only other being a relatively cheap 20 miler I was planning on running last fall as a supported training run & then decided at the last minute not to make the drive for. Obviously it's a bit of a bummer anytime you pay & plan for something & then aren't able to do it, but SF2HM '13 has had me a little more bummed out than I think I would've been otherwise, for a few reasons.

First, I have waited a long time to run this race. It's not a cheap one, and there's a sweet discount for sub-seeded runners, so I decided to put it off until I had a qualifying time. This was one of the reasons I was so excited to finally run a sub-1:40 last year, and I was looking forward to the experience. Second, the course covers most of the same terrain I've pounded day in & day out since I moved to SF in 2008 (it goes almost right by our house), and there's something kind of cool about racing on what is really, truly your home turf. (Er, except that part where you go east through Golden Gate Park. That is pretty much never cool.)

Up until the expo, I'd been doing a pretty good job of not moping & sticking to more of a "Sigh, maybe next year" level of mild disappointment. Walking around amidst people who've been training and tapering and fueling and hydrating & are getting ready to kill it tomorrow (or y'know, just have a really good time), though, I started to feel considerably worse. Every time I thought about the fact that I wouldn't be running, and couldn't even if I was absolutely determined to, I felt sick to my stomach over it.

Which I know is silly, but it's what my jerkbrain is doing right now. With stuff like this, I've learned over the years that I get over it faster if I just admit to myself, "Yes, this is a thing that is happening, that you can do nothing about, and it SUCKS. It's okay to feel crappy for a while so long as you keep it in check. You'll be over it by Monday."

So. I'm trying to keep telling myself "Next year!" and hope my 2014 plans cooperate.

[/melodramatics]

In the mean time, I will be spectating the SHIT out of this race Sunday morning! Cathryn is trying to get me to come dressed as a ninja........Votes?