run

Free Run, Day 11 and 12

Thursday, October 5th, 2023

Saturday, October 7th, 2023 

POST-RUN MORTUM

Time Running: 00:00

Distance Achieved: 00:00

Tunage: ___________________

…..she rested. 

And yikes, does she feel conflicted about it. 

Today is the first day of my training that I have missed without the intention of making it up on another day in the week. Meaning, I am choosing to skip my run today and my run on Saturday. Today is the first day of my training where I have actively chosen rest as a part of my training. 

And it feels weird. 

I don’t do resting, never have. It’s just not something that inherently lives inside of me or is the thing that I will ever choose to do for myself. If I can be moving, I will be moving. If I can be productive inside of that moving, well then that is when I am at my happiest. So this sitting still? This thing we call rest? It’s kind of killing my spirit. But I know I need this. The pain in my knee is still very prominent, and with my work schedule, I haven’t had any time off of the leg, really. Usually, when I’m hurt, I push through it, but the fact that this is my right knee, the knee that I hurt last year, has me a little cautious and a little nervous. 

See, I’ve never been a person with a recurring injury. I’ve been a person who has been injured in the past, several times in fact, when you’re as klutzy as me with a pension for a lack of coordination, it’s hard not to have racked up a good amount of injuries. But in the past, if you were to ask me, “Do you have bad knees or a bad back?” I would have said no. But now, with this recurring thing happening in my leg, I think I have transitioned over into the realm of someone who has a chronic thing. Or something that could be chronic. Or even worse, something that is delicate. 

I hate being delicate. 

Maybe because I’ve been told all of my life that I’m not. You can’t be fat and delicate. You can be a bull in a glass house, but delicate? GTFOOH. 

It’s not a great feeling. But a big old piece of the puzzle for this upcoming year is that I am going to have to be smart about how I treat my body. In every aspect. Which, I suppose, is great, but also means that my mentality of pushing through isn’t going to fly anymore. And I’m so good at doing that, too. But longevity is now a factor in a very real way. 

So we rest. 

It’s so hard to rest. To take this time off. I think it’s partly because it makes me feel like I’m being lazy. Which, honestly, is probably one of the biggest reasons I always keep moving. If you see a fat person lounging about, there are connotations that go along with that, right? I work so fucking hard to trick you into thinking that I’m not lazy, because if I’m not lazy, then I can’t be fat, right? Like, if lazy=fat, then I will not be lazy, therefore not lazy≠fat. See? Logic. Sound logic. And I work really hard to get you to think that I’m ≠fat. And then there’s the shame wrapped up in the reason why I need the rest in the first place, you know? Because that stigma is so real. Of the fat girl who tried to run pulled a muscle, so now she has to sit around on her fat ass. 

These are the thoughts that live rent-free in my head. 

These are the voices I have to actively fight against. And if you, dear reader, have never had that thought, I commend you. Firstly for being just a decent human, and secondly, for not falling victim to the thunderous voices of the world at large feeding you this narrative. 

It’s maddening. And it is just another in a very long line of things that have led me to hurt myself in the past, honestly what probably led me to hurt myself now. 

What has been awesome, though, has been connecting with my incredible community. I took to Instagram, because of course I did, because I wasn’t sure what to do. I didn’t know if I should keep running on the hurt leg. I was wondering if icing it would help, if I could maybe go to acupuncture; I was asking for help, which was a really big step for me because I think you all know how much I struggle with that. But I did. I asked for help. And y’all came through. The biggest takeaway was something that I was told by several people; professional athletes also actively choose rest as a part of their training. This blew my mind. Of course I know that athletes have days of rest, but what I learned was that there are some, runners in particular, who will go beyond their days of rest. If they have a pain, if they don’t feel well, if the weather is bad, or if they just don’t feel like going, they choose to listen to their body and rest and recover. 

Blew my mind. To think that resting could be a part of training. Absolutely mind boggling. Because, y’all, how many thunderstorms have I literally run in because I thought I couldn’t miss a day? Just wild, the lengths I will go to to stay active enough. To present this facade of constant motion because if I don’t then I’ll just be exactly what the world sees: a lazy, fat woman. 

Oof, y’all. Oof.
I think, if i could do this process all over again, I would have a specific running coach. Not surprising to anyone who has been reading this whole thing, but there is a lot that I’m finding out very much in real time. There is something exciting in that, and I’m sure it’s been fun to follow, but damn, I don’t think I would have hurt my leg again if I had known these tidbits about rest from the start. I think I would have been kinder to my body. 

And maybe that’s the greater lesson from all of this, right? Because, real talk, I knew I could run a 5K before I started this process. It is 3.1 miles, I knew I could do that. This was maybe never really about the 5K. But maybe it’s…Jesus, I don’t know, maybe it’s what I needed to realize just how hard I am on myself. Maybe this is the mirror I’ve been avoiding, and not because I’m afraid to see my reflection, but because I’m scared to admit how awful I have been to myself. The standards and expectations I have placed on my shoulders over the years. And now that I know that truth, now that I have acknowledged it, to continue on that way would be irresponsible, right? Right? 

I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore. 

Oof, again. OOF I SAY. 

So yeah. We rested these days. And there is a lot of internal conflict there, but you know what? As I write this on Saturday, my leg feels better. Stronger than it did earlier in the week. There is less pain. There has been healing. 

There has been healing.