evidently I’ve got one foot in the grave.

August 5, 2010

Running has always been a getaway of sorts for me, my exercise of choice.  A routine that requires nothing more than a decent pair of tennis shoes and a ponytail holder.

Cheaper than a gym membership.  More skin covered than swimming laps.  Less annoying than “Five more, ladies, feel it burn!”.

I run for all of those reasons and so I can eat whatever I want.  Seems like a fair trade off because, let’s be real here, I like to eat.

So, there’s this 14.2 mile race I’ve been wanting to run for years where the motto is “Hurdle the weak.  Trample the dead” and every finisher gets this rad tie-dyed t-shirt with a skull and crossbones on it at the end.  Call it a throw back to my wanna-be-punk-rocker stage if you want or motivation to up the running ante, but I suckered a friend into committing to it with me and paid the entry fee.  (Gotta have that tie-dyed t-shirt!)

I bumped my weekly mileage a touch and tried to put forth more than my usual efforts so as not to embarrass myself come race day and to be able to eat more peanut butter.  All was going well until… (enter creepy drum rolly thing here)

My knee started hurting.  No biggie.  Couple of days off.  Ice.  Advil.

Like I said, no biggie.  All part of the running.

9 miles on Saturday.

Knee hurts a lot.  Couple of days off, ice, Advil, still hurts– probably more than it should.

Better check it out.

So, The Hubs calls in a favor and this morning at 10:00 a.m. I’m in a physical therapist’s office.  He asks the general questions and pokes around on my leg a little.  Stretch here.  Stretch there.  Does this hurt?  How about that?

Yadda yadda, you get the picture.

I handled it all pretty well I thought, until he asked me to sit up and said, “So, Emily, how old are you?”

“Um, 29.”

“And you doubled your mileage to train for this race?  Hmmm…”  (head shaking, finger wagging, frown from the uber fit prepubescent marathoner in front of me.)

“You know, you’re not 20 anymore.  It’s probably time to slow it down a little, Ma’am.”

Well, thank you.  Thank you very much.

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