I'm one and a half weeks out from my second foot surgery , and, by all important measures, I'm doing well. But boy has the past week been difficult. In the first few days post-surgery I was in a pretty good mood; the surgery had gone well, I was in the excellent care of my mom, and I had made it past the last major hurdle of this months-long event. All I had to look forward to was recovery and progress and gradually returning to my normal life, whatever that might look like. But even though I've gone through this process once already, it's still just as difficult this time around. There's the constant worrying about this weird feeling or that new pain, the accidental step in the middle of the night when I forgot which foot was injured, and the agonizing wait time between appointments. Now it's compounded by concern over whether I'm taking good enough care of my first foot. Did I ruin the surgery when I stubbed my toe falling off an exercise ball? Am I usin...

Earlier this week I had my three-week follow-up appointment. I'd been really looking forward to this appointment because (1) I hate not feeling reassured in every moment that all is well, and I had to wait a whole two weeks to get that reassurance, and (2) this appointment would hopefully be the one where I could remove all my bandaging for good and get permission to start weaning off the crutches and try walking just in my boot. For the most part, that was the outcome. Although, my doctor wanted to put one light layer of dressing on, until today, when I had permission to remove it and finally wash my foot after three and a half weeks! l need to make sure to keep the incision site clean and apply neosporin and bandaids daily. Shape aside, which is lovely, my foot is pretty gnarly looking. The skin is all hard and wrinkly from having been swollen and then shrunken down, and also from the amount of time it was bandaged up. Now that I can look at it, I don't really want to. I k...

At the end of week two, I'm home on my own and feeling pretty good. But it definitely feels like time has moved slowly. Hopefully the coming weeks will go by a little faster, now that I'm set up for a routine and able to do more for myself. First Follow-up I had my first follow-up appointment last week, which I'd been looking forward to pretty much since the day after surgery. Possibly because I was anticipating it so much, it felt like it would never come. But it did, and it went very well. I got my bulky dressing and "upper foot" cast off, and I finally saw my new foot! Of course, it wasn't beautiful; it was still tinted orange from the betadine used in surgery prep, it was swollen and a little bruised, and my incision was still healing and had strips of medical tape running along it (I'll save a barefoot photo for a later post). But my bunion was gone and my toe was aligned! That was the goal, and it was achieved. The doctor said it only looked lik...

Last weekend I wrote about the ambivalence I'd been feeling about not competing in endurance sports . In a Facebook comment to my post, a friend posed the following question: do you always /have/ to be going forward in everything, all the time? Can you find a way to be comfortable with staying where you are? I think this is emotional work, btw, not physical work. I was just struck, in reading this, by your observation that you can't enjoy something if you're not pushing yourself. But maybe all of this with your foot and knee is your body trying to teach you to be present and be okay with being you just as you are. I thought about my response and battled with it for a long time. A week, in fact. I decided to further explore my reasons in a follow-up post—this one. First, I didn't realize my post had come across as negative; my thinking was, ambivalence by definition is neutral, right? So then I needed to look up the word. According to Merriam-Webster, ambivalence is...

It's been more than seven months since I've had to step away from running . While I've been able to do other things during this time, I've experienced strong and varying emotions every day that I haven't been able to run. It occurred to me only recently, while watching an episode of Jane the Virgin  (an excellent show that I was pretty skeptical about initially), that I've been grieving the loss of running. In the episode, Jane recaps how she went through the well-known Kubler-Ross five stages of grief in one day, over the loss of a relationship. But it was her highlighting of these stages that made me realize I'd been going through the same thing—except over months, and over the loss of running. It may seem trivial, especially given the grave and tragic world events occurring daily, to make such a big deal out of running, but we all still have our personal challenges to deal with each day, and I in no way mean to minimize the suffering of others in this ...

I was going to make this post an update on my foot, and then the weather happened, and suddenly my foot seemed completely insignificant. So I'll make the foot prognosis brief. I met with my orthopedist last week to review my MRI results and plan for recovery. I already knew I had a stress fracture, so I'd prepared a long and detailed list of questions to ask the doctor. The main takeaways are these: I would need to wear my fracture boot again, for two to three months (!) I could not run or walk or use the elliptical or do anything weight bearing, including standing exercises, such as air squats I could, however, continue to swim and even bike, as long as I didn't feel pain or stand on the pedals (as in a spin class or to climb hills--no problem, I live in Florida) Icing would not help, nor would NSAIDs (like ibuprofen), and in fact my doctor said NSAIDs could actually do harm, so I should avoid taking them No type of therapy would help; I just needed to res...

Now that we're well into spring, I may as well post about winter. That is, Florida winter. So here's a three-in-one. I missed the Gasparilla half marathon--the local race I look forward to all year. And it was for a silly reason. I had trained well and felt good the week prior to the race, but at a bootcamp class the Wednesday before the race, I did an exercise the totally killed my hamstrings, only I didn't know it until the next day. And they weren't just sore; I could hardly straighten my legs to walk, let alone use my hamstrings to propel me on a run. But feeling this kind of extreme soreness is not unusual for me after this particular bootcamp class; it's certainly happened before. So I thought by the time Sunday rolled around, I'd be fine. But then as Friday passed, and soon Saturday, I was far less confident that I'd be healed in time to race Sunday. I did everything I could think of to expedite healing: massages, smelly muscle rubs, foam roller, st...

Pretty steady race. I can't complain about my performance. This is long enough overdue--I know. Life has been busy, and that's good. But before I wait too long and attempt a lengthy post that covers everything , here are the highlights from my first (and probably last) Marine Corps Marathon: I'm really  glad I did it . I don't want to give the impression that I'm not. However, running in this race has made me want to cling even more to smaller races. I get a bit of social anxiety--or crowd phobia, or whatever you want to call it--when I'm squished among 30,000 other runners. I beat a Goonie . Yes, Sean Astin, the darling asthma kid from the Goonies (yay for asthma representation in the media!) ran this race, and I ran it faster than him. That doesn't mean much, but in a race in which I didn't PR, I have to claim something. His net time was 4:29:11, and his clock time was 4:30:56 (all in all, a great time). But this is significant because it me...

Yesterday morning I ran my first big race since the marathon . It's a special race for me, because this particular race was my first half marathon, in 2009. Originally called the " Women's Running Magazine Women's Half Marathon" (yes, a redundant mouthful), and then the "Lady Speed Stick Women's Half Marathon" (can you guess the sponsor they gained?), and now simply the " Women's Running Series Half Marathon," the race has changed quite a bit over the years. It began as a local race, which initiated from what was then a local publication, Women's Running Magazine   (now owned by Competitor Group --the same company that owns the Rock 'n' Roll Marathon Series, Muddy Buddy Series, and Competitor Magazine , to name a few). Perhaps you can already see where I'm going with this. The race series has branched out to Nashville, San Diego, and Scottsdale, in addition to St. Pete. It's becoming another big-name race series, d...