Here, Let Me Talk About Myself...

Alright, let's be honest here:  Sunday wasn't a good day.  I didn't handle that quite as well as I thought I might.

Also, my great Aunt Becky, whom I'm named after, is very, very sick and the time frame right now is one to two months.  I'm not that close to Aunt Becky, but my mom is, and my grandma certainly is, and they're both going through a very difficult time right now with this.

And I'm going through a difficult time remembering this time last year, and I'm not all that sure how to handle it because much as losing someone so young was new to me, so is marking the milestones for that loss.

And my fucking foot hurts like hell.

I made it through the 18-miler on Saturday with pain in many areas of my body, but my foot was not one of them.  After making it down to Mississippi, I drank more than I should and spent more time on my feet than I should, but I was pleasantly surprised just how mobile I was when I got out of bed Sunday morning.

Mid-morning, I put on some tennis shoes and noticed some pain in my left foot.  I was annoyed, but told myself that I ran 18 (motherfucking) miles the day before and I would be a fool to think there wouldn't be consequences.  But as the day wore on, the pain got worse.

So my foot hurts, I'm sad and depressed, my family is sad and depressed, thus I'm in bed by 7:30.

Still not feeling great after a long night's sleep, I briefly considered calling into work Monday morning and taking a personal day.  But I didn't.  On the upside, my foot seemed to feel better...until I put my shoes on. By the time I was leaving work to go home, my foot hurt so bad I could barely walk to my car.  Which put me in full panic mode:  I'm texting people, Facebooking people, putting up cries for help on the Breakaway Facebook page, calling podiatrists, being told there are no appointments for weeks, crying to my mom on the phone, convincing myself it's a stress fracture, convincing myself it's not a stress fracture, generally THIS IS NOT A GOOD TIME.

Today, I took off work, went to see my general physician, and had an X-ray.  While I was waiting for the doctor to come in, the X-ray technician and the nurse stood outside my door, talking about my X-rays.

Technician:  "What is that?"

Nurse:  "That's called 'runner's foot.'  I ran track and cross country and high school and all the repeated pounding... [unintelligible as her voice drops to a whisper]"

Technician:  "And right here?"

Nurse:  "Uh huh."

Technician:  "Uh oh."

Nurse:  "Yeah."

They walked down the hall and I could only hear bits and pieces of what they were saying, but I heard the word "pounding" several times, as well as the phrase "all that pressure and then..."

So I sat there, in that room, for ten minutes waiting for the doctor, thinking that my foot was broken.

That was a long goddamn ten minutes.

But my foot is not broken.  (Whew!)  It's just been under a lot of strain recently and it's not all that happy with me.  My doctor, though, has run a marathon or two in his day and he understood my concern and even helped me formulate a plan to cut back on my mileage this week but keep running so as soon as I'm back to normal, I can jump back into full training mode.

This week did not start off well, but now that things don't seem quite so dire, I'm feeling a little embarrassed about the way I freaked out yesterday.

So...deep breath.  The new plan is to wake up tomorrow and go back to being myself.  I'm usually steadier than this. 

I'm okay, I'm okay, I'm okay.