I'm sitting here on the bed in my hotel room in Greensboro, North Carolina, Regionals are Saturday. For us Regionals is the biggest, last and most important race of the year. This is the race that the entire last 3 months have revolved around. All the hard work, long runs and early morning have been leading up to this. And I'm hobbling around on crutches.
I should backtrack a little bit here though. Things were going pretty well after the home meet on September 5th. I had some bad races but then figured things out and was starting to put together decent races. And with cooler weather I didn't have to battle dehydration and heat problems any more.
It started with some pain on the outside of my left knee and a nagging weakness/pain in my right hip. Not a big issue, I'd been running 75 mile weeks for the first time in my life ever and feeling GREAT doing it. I just needed to back off, take some more ice baths, get back on the foam roller and I'd be good. The morning after setting a pr of 28:23 at the regional preview meet in North Carolina on October 17th I set off for my normal Sunday morning long run with the group at the local running store. After grimacing for the first 16 minutes the pain in my left knee was excruciating every time I flexed or extended it. It felt like the knee cap was being wrenched to the side. I finally couldn't take it any more, turned around and walked 2 miles back to the parking lot.
I spent the next 2 weeks in some form of mild hypothermia from spending up to an hour a day sitting in the ice bath. I heated, stemmed, rehabbed, rolled, stretched, iced, even a cortison shot didn't help as much as we'd hoped. Basically I was doing everything I possibly could to heal my knee- including not running. In fact I ran only once between North Carolina and our conference meet on October 31st. The problem was an extremely tight left IT band and I was averaging 2-4 hours a day in the athletic training room or doing some sort of rehab work on my knee. On top of this all that niggle in my right hip had turned into a very worrisome weakness that prevented me from weighting it fully and didn't allow me to put my pants on without sitting down.
I was swimming like a beast though!
After running once in the 2 week lead up I lined up to race the American Southwest Conference Championships with jumping jacks serving as my only warm up. The UT Tyler men's XC team was 4-time defending champions, going for our 5th straight title and as the number 4/5 runner with no real 6th guy to rely on I had to race. Race I did, and I am extremely proud of my performance. It wasn't especially fun or pretty but I ran with all my heart taking 13th overall, 2nd team all-conference and 4th on the team. Others faltered though and we the team took 2nd. At the end of the race I just thanked the Lord for giving me strength to run and compete. God had kept my knee strong enough to run and give everything I had for the team. We still had regionals in two weeks though...
The bus ride home from conference was bad. My IT band kept tightening up and causing me some pretty intense pain that I had to get the trainer to massage out a couple times. Since my knee had been improving I was hoping that a few days off it again and I could try to get 2 or 3 workouts in before regionals. That, I believed would be enough to keep me sharp and the extra rest I knew would benefit me. My knee did continue to heal, but my hip was a different story. Wednesday, November 4th I spent all morning at the Doctor's getting X-ray and MRI done to determine if I had a stress fracture or not. The verdict was no and so Thursday morning I went out and completed a solid workout on the track.
The next few days had my knee hardly bothering me at all but I was now limping noticeably because of my hip. If I didn't have a stress fracture then why did it hurt so bad!?! Sunday morning November 8th, less than a week from regionals I went down to a park with some nice paths and completed possibly my best workout of the year. I was popping! Monday morning I woke up and couldn't walk.
It's not a stress fracture but instead tendinitis of my psoas (hip flexor) where it connects on the femur at the lesser trochanter. I've been using crutches to gimp around all week and it takes extreme concentration, effort and pain to even lift my right knee in the air. It's been getting better all week but the race is only 40 hours away now. Painkillers and anti-inflammatory's have been a mainstay of my diet these past few weeks. I can only swim with a pull buoy and my legs tied together. The decision to race may not come until I'm quite literally on the starting line.
It's so cliché, I know, but you don't really appreciate something until it’s taken away from you. Much worse than the physical pain of a hurt leg is the pain of not being able to run. I love running, I really do. There's nothing like going for a run when your depressed, when your mind is full, when your crying out to God for answers, when you feel great, when the weather's beautiful, when it's early in the morning and the first rays of the sun are causing the dew on the grass to glisten, nothing.
We arrived in North Carolina today and headed over to Guilford College for everyone to run around and re-familiarize themselves with the course. I and my crutches stayed behind and while the team ran I limped around the wet, muddy field and cried out to God. "Why Lord?" “Why?” “Why this terrible blend of physical and emotional pain?” "I've been trying so hard to follow your will Lord." "I just want to run God." "I just want to run."
Spiritually this semester has seen a lot of challenges and growth in me. God has been working on me in a lot of areas and I’ve grown much closer in my relationship with Him. It’s funny how God will choose to work on a lot of different areas of your life at once. Actually it’s not funny, it’s painful and somewhat depressing. I’ve tried so hard to listen to God and hear be receptive to what He’s telling me but it’s not always for us to understand the why of things. The Lord works in mysterious ways. There it is- another cliché but so true. When we’re in the midst of a struggle it’s hard to understand why things are playing out the way they are.
I don’t know what tomorrow will bring, or Saturday for that matter but I intend to run if at all possible. I didn’t come to North Carolina to be a cheerleader. That’s all I ask and if God grants me that gift in two days I will be grateful. In the New Testament Paul calls Christians not to a life of ease but one of hardships and suffering. Physical, spiritual, mental and emotional suffering. My prayer is that God heals my leg enough so that I can suffer this Saturday. Suffer just as Christ suffered on the cross for us. I believe that as we push ourselves in the physical realm, as we sweat, bleed, hurt; that we grow closer to God and gain a better understanding for the sacrifice Jesus Christ made for us on the cross. I pray that God will give me that opportunity to grow closer to Him when the gun goes off in Greensboro, North Carolina at 12:00 pm, this Saturday, November 14th.
