The Chunky Gazelle

Hello.  Remember me?  I’m the chunkiest little gazelle that wanted to run a marathon and trained so hard she completely forgot to write about her progress.  And now, here we are two weeks before the 2011 ING New York City Marathon and what do we have?

A stress fracture in my pelvis.  Defer my Marathon acceptance to 2012. (Even though I locked up another 9+1 back in May.  Overachiever.)

Obviously, I’m more than a little crushed.  But in the 24 hours since the diagnosis, I’ve been trying to keep everything in perspective and find some silver linings.

• It is a stress fracture of the pelvis, not any injury of the actual hip joint.  This will heal (with 6-8 weeks of no running… yuck) and be as good as new and some PT will help me not do this again.  A hip injury would have been life changing, and not in the good way.
• Deferring my first New York means I have more time to prepare to run the race of my dreams.  I’ve been amazed at the progress I’ve made as a distance runner over the past 6 months of little by little ramping up to the full marathon distance but of course there is room for improvement.  If I take some time off and then start training again, I will have a better idea of what I will need to make this round even more efficient and hopefully continue to get faster. 
• I can now cheer on all of the runners I’ve been training with.
• Fingers crossed my uncle will get in next year and we will be able to run the race “together.”  (i.e. Same streets, same finish line, same year, likely different corrals, definitely different paces…)
• If I were to muscle through and run this year, I would likely do so in consistent pain.  I want my first marathon to be tough and I want it to hurt.  But I want it to hurt so good.  Not hurt like I’m being kicked in the lady-bits every other step.  (I did my last long run on the injury and halfway through the run that is the only way I could describe it.  Well, that or THIS.)
• I now have a second chance to actually document how I am feeling as this process goes along.  I was decent with the Twitter , but anything longer than 140 characters fell completely off the map.  

I’m not saying it’s all daisies and kittens and glitter and penguins in sweaters.  I am sure that at some point over the next two weeks, surrounded by the Asics ads on the sides of buses and in the Time Warner Center, the I’M IN ads in all the subways, the banners in Central Park, and the bleachers that will soon grace Columbus Circle, I’m going to have a good cry or two.  I worked hard, damnit.   I want to run this race with my team and I want to cross that finish line.  But the fates (and my pelvis) have decided that 2011 isn’t my year.

So here’s to being the Marathon class of 2012.  Or, as I shall think of it 2011.5.  We came, we ran like hell, we hit a setback, and we are going to rebuild and be that much stronger.

xo,

cg