Just Be Stubborn

I would like to preface this post by saying that I generally advocate listening, and listening well.  I believe, as I learned in rehab (yes, that kind of rehab, which I will explain soon enough), that to be aware is to be alive.  Being aware necessitates being attentive, which means listening to not just what is said, but to what is not said, and to what cannot be said, because it's not linguistic.  I mean that you have to be able to listen to your body, to the body language of the people around you, to interpret expressions, lack of expression, actions, and environments.  By paying attention to all of that (and whatever I may not have mentioned that is of importance), you will have plenty of things to do, and boredom can never be an excuse for your actions (or lack of action).  If you are aware and attentive, if you listen to your mind, body, and to others, you can learn quite a bit, and begin to live well.

But as is true of any suggested rule or set of rules that I can think of (and being a philosopher, I can think of many, trust me) there are counterexamples, exceptions.  In the case of the maxim which can envelope what I said above, namely; listen and learn--there are times when you have to go against the suggestions of said rule. For example, when you wretch at the smell of some food item, when it totally turns you off if it is the main part of a dish, and when you can barely touch said food item without being sort of grossed out, don't eat it!  Nature has given us plenty of differently textured, colored, flavored, and scented things to eat, so we should just consume what we aren't repulsed by.  That was the case with bananas and me.  I have never like bananas, they always smelled weird to me, they looked weired, the few times I tasted them I gagged, and I found very little appealing about them.  But before I started this running venture, while working in the health and nutrition sector of retail, I found out a few things that warmed me up to bananas.

A) Potassium is key for sending messages throughout the nervous system.  This includes the brain, muscles (like the heart, muscle tissue in the intestines, and other organs), and nerves throughout the body.

B) Potassium can be the cause of cramps during endurance exercises such as running (RUNNING!!!)

C) Potassium is so hard to get in the necessary amounts from any source other than BANANAS that you would have to swallow 30 large potassium supplement pills, eat a few CUPS of Almonds (which would just about tax your fat allowance for the day) or.....eat a BANANA!!!!

So I decided that I had to give in, and I started making fruit smoothies almost daily, with a huge banana in them.  You know what, I kind of like bananas now.  So I heard the maxims that nature provided me, and I listened to my wretching body, and I promptly ignored it.

Also, as has been documented in previous posts, I have  been dealing with a foot....deal.  It's like an injury, but less consistent.  I'll run one day and it'll be sore near the end of the run and for an hour or so later, then end the day fine.  I'll wake up the next morning (like yesterday morning, for instance), and it'll be stiff up to the ankle and hurting all day.  So I gave it from last Thursday to this Monday off, trying to be attentive to my body's signals.  But when I woke up today with no pain or stiffness, I decided that yeah, it's good to listen, but if the person you're listening to is f*@#ing crazy, you won't learn anything, and you'll waste time.  So I went out and ran a full 5 kilometers, fully expecting my foot to start babbling on halfway through, still making no sense, but telling me to stop.  So about halfway through, as ol' lefty started nagging me, I decided that since my calves were still a bit sore from Monday's big run, I'll push more from my quads down to my knees. And whaddaya know, this shut my foot right up.  I ran the next 1 and a half miles in that mode and my foot stopped bothering me.  When I got to the home stretch, I even stepped up the pace a little and ended with both feet doing fine.  I also managed to beat my current solo 5k record by nearly a minute, clocking in at 27:53.

So what have I learned from this experience?  Sure, listening is good.  If you don't listen you your mother, she'll get angry and punish you.  If you don't listen to your girlfriend, you can bank on not having said girlfriend for long, and if you don't listen to your body, it will rebel and make you sorry.  But just because you listen doesn't mean that you have to accept what's being said.  So I found that while it was good to listen to my foot's moaning and groaning, after a while I just realized that 's moaning and groaning because it's a pussy (which prompted me to ask it to stop pussy-footing around, *zing*), and while I should listen to it, I can also tell it to stop being whiny and run with me.  Stubborn? Maybe.  Effective?  Absolutely.

Drastic Changes

I would like to start off this post with an apology.  Erin, I am sorry.  I told you I wasn't going to run, that I would take it easy on my foot and be prudent, but I felt crazy energetic this morning and did it anyway.  I'm sorry, baby, but I had to.  That last clause, however, is a good segue into the main theme of this post.  You see when I first started this quest of mine, a little over a month ago, I did so because I hated to run.  I had no love for running, especially long distances.  But I knew from experience, that the only way to make a drastic change in your life...is to make a drastic change.  Now this might sound like a tautology to most of you, and semantically speaking, it is.  However, instead of being totally non-informative, like most tautologies, this one holds the key to changing your life.  When I started this journey, I knew that in order to make it happen, I'd have to run on a schedule.  This schedule would stay the same whether I wanted to run or not.  If there wasn't a tornado, volcano, J-Lo, or anything else that ends in "o" outside, I would have to be there, running.  To do that would be the drastic change that I would make.  Now, having committed and made that change, I found myself today wanting--nay, needing--to run, despite the lingering pain and stiffness in my left foot (and lack of good running shoes to cradle it).  That is the drastic change that happened to me, which was the result of the change that I made.  So now the tautology should make some sense to you; if you want things to change drastically, you need to make drastic changes.  It was the workings of that law of the will that placed me in my living room, staring at my shoes as I put them on, thinking that a quick 3 mile run couldn't hurt.

But here's the kicker: though the pain kicked in pretty badly around the halfway mark, I used a little extra effort to keep the pressure off the left foot and trudged on.  I got in, iced it for a while, and it feels the same as when I woke up, which is far better than yesterday.  I wouldn't dare propose that the moral of this story is "keep running, even when your foot is begging you not to," but I will make the proposal that I didn't necessarily do the wrong thing this morning.  Yes, I could have sat around and nursed my foot, lord knows I have the free time.  I could've popped open a book, propped my foot up on the couch and let the day pass by.  But when it comes down to it, I have made running a part of my life.  I have never felt better than I do since I started.  I have more confidence, a sense of continuing accomplishment, and am more in tune with my body and my mind.  Simply put, running was that daily communion that I had been searching for, but never found.  In that way, it's kind of like your car keys; you're just miffed that you can't find them, and when you do, they're always in the last place you looked, and usually in a place you didn't think they could be.  Our world makes life tough enough as it is, take your peace where you can get it.  But just because you've found your peace, your spirit, doesn't mean you have answers, it just means that you're okay with letting the questions stay open-ended.

The Iceman

When I started on this quest to go from lazy to long-distanceer (I probably made that word up, just to warn you), I either assumed that I was invincible or forgot to consider that I was not.  Either way, I made the mistake of not taking into account that a) I don't have running shoes, just these guys, 40 dollars worth of nylon and minimal suede with a thin, uncoushioned sole

and b) the fact that I don't pay attention to (a) makes it that much easier to sustain a foot/ankle injury.  You see, my routes have always centered around side-streets and winding "no-outlet" roads and such, but there are parts of the route in which uneven grassy land is unavoidable (unless I liked the idea of being hit by cars).  Being an inexperienced runner and having the resulting unpolished stride and lack of "all-terrain" running knowledge, if I'm just pushing it for a half mile, pounding the ground, I do it the same for any terrain.  Silly me, for this allowed my weak foot (ol' lefty to me) to pound too hard, on too uneven a ground, and somehow hurt himself.  This is an injury that I have sustained before (though I don't remember how).  It's just at the midpoint of my foot, right on the outside, and stretches back to near the heal.  I noticed it after my session on Wednesday, but thought it was just soreness.  I iced it a little that day and walked more on the inside of that foot around campus yesterday.  I thought that if I could just stretch my foot back a little while stretching before today's run, and then run more on the inside of my foot (toward the arch), I'd be okay--at least for most of the run.  From the get-go, I could feel my foot yelling at me each time it dropped.  "Don't do this, you're not far, you can turn around!" he'd plead with me "When you slam me down on the ground, you're applying almost a ton of force upon me, it doesn't matter which part of my you favor, all of me feels it!"

Well, I politely told my foot to shove it and continued down the usual 5k path.  Around the end of the second mile, I encounter a long patch of uneven, slightly uphill grassland.  By that time, I had gotten accustomed to the persevering thud of my foot against the concrete and asphalt, but the grass and hard, bumpy dirt underneath was a different story.  Around that time, I had to stop.  I limp-jog/walked until I got off the grass, then legged it for the rest of the run on the asphalt.  Needless to say, no time improvement today.  But I have the quixotic hope that if I stay iced like T.I. and bring the heat like Gordon Ramsay for the duration of the weekend, I can do 4 miles on Monday.  Actually let me put that in terms that agree more with the approach that I've come to take with myself about working toward this goal.

I will ice my foot, and heat it accordingly this weekend.  Then on Monday morning, I will run 4 miles, whether I feel up to it or not.  Whatever happens afterward is totally open, but as for what will occur after I stretch and step out the door until I return to my front door, I cannot waver on that.