This is the fifth article in a series describing my first ever running injury in 20 years, how I’ve dealt with it heretofore, and my path to recovery.
Let me start out by saying the past two days have been days of good news. My knee is feeling as good as it has in a while, I received some positive news on the personal finance front and a great friend landed a great job yesterday, all of which make me very happy.
I’m also due for the next installment of my injury tale so without further ado, here is where the story gets interesting.
I returned home from Germany on the most miserable plane ride I have had and firmly believe I probably will ever have. Having no immunity to any German cold viruses, naturally I caught one. And I caught it about five minutes before I boarded my flight. With no opportunity to take any medicine, nor procure any tissues (I would speak the word Kleenexes here but it feels funny writing it), this was not a fun experience.
I survived, however, and a few days upon returning to San Francisco returned to see Nicole for my next PT checkup:
“How are things going?”
“Eh, about the same.”
“Any new issues?”
“Nope.”
Sheepishly, I denied any outlawed running, and I think she believed me (it’s possible she saw right through me, she’s sneaky). After all, my knee did feel fine the day after I iced it in Germany, and things were still pretty much normal now that I was back in SF. One more PT visit down, things with my knee seemed to be progressing as they should, life was good.
Training log for May
Two more weeks went by, weeks in which I obeyed the no-running rule (you can view May’s training log overview to the right). I also wasn’t doing my PT exercises as frequently as I probably should have but I was making noticeable positive progress each day so my incentive to do so was definitely diminished.
At this point I should break the chronological timeline and go back to the middle of March of this year. My great friend Rob lives just outside of NYC and approached me with the idea of participating in the New York Ragnar Relay, a 182-mile relay race that starts upstate in the Catskills and roughly follows the Hudson River south before finishing in the Bronx’s Van Cortlandt Park, where I ran a few times during my very brief collegiate running career.
Having just come off a rough week, I was eager for the adventure and said I was in. I bought my plane ticket, and added New York and the race date, May 15-16, to my very busy spring travel calendar.
Scene along the Ragnar Relay course in upstate New York
Fast forward now back to May. Despite my knee injury I was determined to run the relay – I had been looking forward to it for a long time, and besides, I knew it would be a ton of fun. I never told Nicole it was on the horizon but it was there, in the back of my mind, an indelible date on my training and recovery calendar that Nicole, naturally, had no idea existed.
And my PT visits in the beginning of May proved promising. In fact, the timing seemed to be working out perfectly: the Monday before the Ragnar Relays Nicole said I could start running. The beginning of that week I was in LA for a conference for work, and I ventured out of my hotel the first evening for a 1-mile run. A half mile out, a half mile back, and a grin from ear to ear: everything felt fine.
The next day, I added an extra half mile to the total, taking in a little bit more of the Simi Valley scenery. And the next day, a whopping 2 miles. No knee issues, and I was floating on air. I caught the evening flight out of Burbank Airport back to San Francisco, switched terminals at SFO and hung out there for about an hour, then caught the red eye for Newark, the omnipresent plane noise accompanied by thoughts of the pending running adventure.
There are many Ragnar Relay events held across the country in places diverse as New England, Florida, Washington state, southern California, Arizona, Utah, Wisconsin and Minnesota. The premise of each is the same: 12 team members run approximately 180 miles starting sometime on the morning of the first day, and finish approximately 24 hours later. The teams split up into two vans of six people each, and while one van’s six runners are racing, the other six can drive ahead, and rest for their upcoming legs (this becomes especially important during the overnight legs). The race is divided into 36 legs, three for each runner. No two legs are the same. Some are mountainous or hilly, some flat. Some are more than eight miles, some less than three. Some run during the day, and some occur at 3 in the morning. The only consistency in the whole plan is that all 11 runners on your team need to run before you can run your next leg; hence if you start with leg 2, that means you also run leg 14 and leg 26.
The New York Ragnar Relay course: 182 miles from Kingston to NYC. My legs were nos. 8, 20, and 32.
My team consisted primarily of Rob’s co-workers and their acquaintances, most of whom were recreational runners. I wouldn’t consider myself a professional runner per se, but I was a former high school and collegiate athlete, a former coach and a member of an ultrarunning club so by comparison I was among the team’s die-hards and earned the privilege of running the longest and most difficult legs of the 182-mile jaunt from Kingston to New York.
In April, before my injury, I was thrilled about my assignment. After the injury, you can imagine I was a bit nervous.
But I wouldn’t know what was in store for me until that fateful day in May arrived.
