It has been two weeks since I injured my leg and 12 days since I last ran. Woof.
I should be in the middle of week 4 of my training cycle but instead I find myself just hanging out, resting and doing a lot of light stretching. At the time of the injury, it didn’t seem very severe and I thought no big deal, inconvenient, but no big deal. I thought I’ll take a week off and be back at it in on time. WRONG!
I am relatively pain free at this point which is different then last week.  I have attempted two test runs and both stopped within 18 seconds of starting and when I say test runs it was trying to run from the car to the grocery store the other day and to the car from home. So maybe a total of 150 feet. Those light runs told me very quickly that my leg is not ready and will not be ready anytime soon.
I am going to go see a Sports Medicine Doctor today to evaluate my options and see if we can do anything to accelerate the healing process. In the back of my mind, I kind of think the only thing that will work is time off. I am not ready to face that reality. Even though that is what it seems to be anymore.
I am hopeful that he will suggest some sort of therapy that have me running in another 10 days or so. I don’t know where that leaves me for the Carmel Marathon. In a tough spot I know that. That would leave me 10 weeks to race day and really probably only 7-8 weeks of being actually able to do some real work with a build up in running and a small taper period. If everything went perfectly from here I fully believe that I can get back into some pretty good shape and take a run at 2:52 or so…2:45 is probably gone in my book. That is definitely not optimal but that is all I can hope for right now because otherwise I don’t know what to do with myself.
We’ll see what the Dr. says today.
I feel like I am now chasing a ghost.
Have you ever dealt with an injury? What did your recovery look like? How did you handle it mentally?
*Update: I saw the doctor today and it went pretty well so I am very encouraged by that. She thought that  a pretty decent strain at the the top of my hamstring by my butt but no rupture of the muscle based on my healing to date.  She recommended PT three days a week and thought that in a couple of weeks I would be back to my marathon cycle mileage. So that is very encouraging! I start therapy on Monday so we’ll see how it goes.
Also on a side note, I am pretty sure the doctor was about my age. So apparently we are now old enough to have doctors as peers. Time to face it I guess.
Glenn