Agh! My Groin!
I’ve done something to my groin. It snuck up on me, at the beginning of March I can remember running - in the bitterest cold - thinking, the inside top of my left leg sure does hurt a little bit. I presumed it would be a thing that would just go away by itself. Even when two weeks later I spent the morning of my birthday shuffling around the indoor track, congratulating myself on lapping pensioners, children and one person clearly in phsyiotherapy. Sucks to be you, I’m in peak health.
Here we are in April, it still sure does hurt a little bit. I took a week off, and really it didn’t get any better but I thought, ah it’s been a week, that’s enough. So the next week I went back to doing 60km. Unsurprisingly, I took some more time off after that, ten days to round out the month. Except, crucially, for Wednesday March 29, where I did 7km at lunchtime, at my normal pace, and felt fine. Oh, I thought, the cure for this running injury is… more running. Thursday and Friday were wet so I accidentally rested some more and then confidently gunned it for 9km on Saturday. Nope, I’m fucked.
I am (was) supposed to be doing the Toronto Marathon on May 7 (ie 5 weeks from today). This is now clearly toast. Best case really is that I drop it down to a 10k and scuttle around the route, mainly so I can get the shirt I’ve already paid for. This also screws my (can’t remember if it was a secret) plan to qualify for Boston 2024, a month after I turn 40.
So yeah, time for a proper rest. I don’t think I can physically stop myself from running, but it will be much closer to the walking end of the spectrum; I did 6km of this today and it feels alright. Future me may disagree.
The risk here (and some of the reason I’ll keep running anyway) is that if I don’t run, there’s a strong chance I will spend the entire recovery period eating myself into diabetes. This, I realise (believe me), is not a healthy situation and the subject of a much longer, future post I am unlikely to ever write. So what I’m going to do instead is count to 90. Ninety days of healthy eating, stretching, light cardio and maybe a few push-ups. This will take me to July 1, where we move to our newly-purchased house, into which I hopefully won’t have to be rolled like a ball of cheese.