That month of training sure was nice!  But for now it’s back to that place that every runner dreads: Injuryland.  It was a femur over the summer and now it’s a tibia.  While I’m convinced that tibias are tiny and insignificant in comparison to femurs so this should take no time to heal, I’ve been told otherwise. All I can say is: at least winter is on its way and there’s no Ascent to prepare for at the moment.  I should add that you may think a femur would hurt more than a tibia – yeah, you’d be wrong.  It’s gotten much better in the past day or two, it pretty much only hurts at the end of the day, but in the middle of last week I was about ready to cut my lower leg off with the scissors sitting on my desk. 

That said, I watched as my Fall Series team, the fearfully named “Lady Marmots,” secured our second place series standings this morning in Palmer Park.  Watching (aka not running) was honestly not as bad as I thought it would be.  Yes, I would have liked to run with them, but cheering and writing an article for PikesPeakSports wasn’t a bad alternative.  It’s a sign of maturity, I’d say, to realize that one missed raced is better than hurting myself further and missing a lifetime of races.  Also, receiving text messages with devil emoticons from your PT generally serves as a reminder that running would be exceedingly stupid.

The less eventful part of my day was the Sunday Long Run in the pool.  In the time it would take to run a half marathon, I instead managed to “run” back and forth across the deep end of the rather cold YMCA pool a near infinite number of times.  Intervals do break up the monotony of it all, so do fellow runners stuck in “Injuryland”  that uneventful place where pool running is as good as it gets. So, thank you Shannon Payne for “running” with me, we all know I would have been miles behind on land despite my 45 minute head start :-)

So, back to the fact that my legs apparently hate me. Well, to clarify, the second injury was probably a result of over-compensating for the first once I started training again, so it’s still all the fault of that damn femur! Here’s a little story about how shocking this really is: I spent nearly a decade in Wisconsin growing up.  It is a cold and icy landscape much of the year punctuated by deer stands (translation: wooden structures from which people shoot deer, I don’t understand the appeal either), Packers flags, ice fishing huts (I fail to see anything redeeming about ice fishing – you are literally sitting on a frozen lake for hours, usually in sub-zero temperatures just waiting for fish that will taste like lake water) and dairy farms.  The people are hearty, they consume copious amounts of dairy products (and beer) so they when they inevitably fall on all that ice, they bounce right back up and if they’ve had enough beer they won’t remember it anyway.  Add to my calcium intake the fact that I wear Hokas.  Hokas are essentially God’s gift to runner kind (especially the Cliftons).  With that glorious foam, I thought it was pretty much impossible to get hurt.  Turns out I was wrong…come on Hoka, how could you do this to me?