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| Picasso's Cubist sculpture in Chicago's Daley Plaza adorns this year's medal. I felt similarly distorted upon learning I'd suffered a serious running injury weeks before the race. |
You can tell me when it's over, if the high was worth the pain.
-Taylor Swift
I was only a few blocks away from home finishing a run when I received the call.
"You have a stress fracture," the sports medicine doctor said. "Chicago is out."
I took a deep breath and stopped. This was not what I was expecting at all. Just two days before I was explaining my predicament in the doctor's nicely appointed medical complex, filled with autographed pictures and jerseys from players in Atlanta's pro and college football teams. I felt a little foolish about it, but there was just one thing.
I somehow could not run fast. Eleven-minute miles were about all I could do for days on end.
It had been 16 days since I ran an extremely good race in the Craft Classic Half Marathon and my recovery was taking an extremely long time for someone who has been able to run at pace just a few days after running in a marathon.
I didn't think it was my knee but there was a strange pain around it and my leg seemed to do all kinds of crazy things like it was no longer stable. And when I tried to push off on the ball of my right foot, my leg felt weak.
The doc listened to me and then did a bunch of tests all along my leg. Nothing hurt.
"The good news is it's not anything obvious," he said. "The bad news ... is it's not anything obvious."
So he set up an appointment for an MRI the very next day.
In the weeks after the half marathon, my mileage was dropping fast. I went from an average of about 50 miles a week to just over 40 miles the first week. That's when I tried to do my speed and tempo workouts and just couldn't do them after a few miles.
The next week -- just three weeks before the Oct. 9 Bank of America Chicago Marathon -- I had my last 16 mile run under the Hansons Marathon Method scheduled. Music Midtown had taken up my usual running route around Lake Clara Meer in Piedmont Park so instead I ran on the loop around the Atlanta Track Club's new offices, an industrial complex just off of Interstate 85 and the Sweetwater Brewery.
The loop was nearly perfect, about 1.3 miles and as flat as you could expect to find in hilly Atlanta. I could only run 5 miles before giving up. I ended the week with 31 miles.
Still, I pushed on. With just two weeks before the marathon, I ran my last significant run of length -- a pair of easy 10-mile runs on Saturday and Sunday. After I finished the Sunday workout, I felt like I'd felt after running the half marathon, slightly sore and particularly stiff around my right knee and leg. I could not walk down stairs normally with my right foot.
The wife scheduled my appointment with the sports medicine office, as she'd recently sought guidance for a runner's knee and had also had an MRI. Initially I wasn't convinced I'd need to seek help but after the second 10-mile run troubled me, I was grateful the appointment was the very next day.
The office for the MRI luckily was in the same medical complex and this was the first time I'd ever seen one in real life. You put your things away in a locker in another room, particularly anything metal that would love to fly around magnetically at a high speed. The tech asked me a few different times which part of my body would be scanned and if I had anything metal inside me, like shrapnel pieces or a pacemaker.
The main thing for me was lying down in the machine when my leg was being scanned. It was nestled very well to prevent me from moving but it really was just the thought that I was not supposed to move made me want to move even more.
Even wearing earplugs, the machine's noise was loud and made War of the Worlds-style buzzing noises. The whole thing took 25 minutes and the digital display I could see on the machine recording the time spent reminded me of all those weeks of speedwork I'd done leading up to this.
When the doc called me, there were 12 days before the marathon. I'd already told him that I agreed that I was no longer interested in running in the marathon since if I couldn't run fast for two miles, how could I expect to run a marathon?
Still, he warned me that my recovery would take longer if I ran in it and my leg could completely fracture.
The problem with being convinced not to run in a marathon that was going to happen in 12 days was there were still 12 days left, way too much time for me to think about it.
It was little things at first, the race T-shirt was cool, all of the daily reminders on social media from the marathon of how soon the race was approaching. There also was the fact that all of my travel plans were made way in advance. Not going meant eating probably $1,200 -- in non-refundable plane fares for a family of four, the $185 race fee and one reservation at Chicago's Palmer House Hilton, where I stayed when I ran in the race in 2010.
And then, in the back of my head, there was a little voice. It was actually more like a little thought, something you should never think when you are told you have a crack in one of your bones.
You can still run in this race.
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