I’ve already communicated this with most of my family and friends who support me in running, but I’ve suffered my second setback of 2022. The first one was back in January when I had to miss out on my first chance to do an in-person half marathon due to catching a really bad cold or flu. I don’t remember which, only that it wasn’t COVID.

Now, a few days away from my next 10K, I seem to have developed a pain in the ball of my right foot. I will be seeing a doctor to find out what it actually is, but there’s a 99.99999% chance that it would not be a good idea to even attempt to run the 10K at a slow speed if I want a chance of recovering in time for the marathon this fall.

It’s funny, last week I thought my post about the 10K would just be about me admitting that beating 40 minutes was a bit ambitious even though I definitely had it in me to beat my previous times. But these are the curve balls that life throws at you.

As most humans do, I spent today going through the grief cycle. (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance) Well, to be honest, I spent the last week in denial which is why I allowed myself to go a little harder on my workout yesterday and get me to the point where seeing a doctor ASAP was in order.

But today I went through the rest of the stages, informing my family and friends. They were all incredibly supportive, which was awesome and I think helped me get through to acceptance. At this point I’m hoping that even with my denial, I caught things early enough to have a quicker recovery. That way I can maybe at least be prepared for a marathon run, even if it can’t be as fast as I wanted. I also hope I can do the other races I signed up for. I was really looking forward to most of them.

After this year, and this maybe this is me sliding a little bit back into depression (the stages aren’t just something you move through and finish without any back-sliding), I want to re-evaluate my distance goals and the reasons I have those goals. It is just a fact that the more I run, the more stress I put on my feet, knees, etc. It may be better to find a distance that works best with my body and doesn’t work those joints, tendons, etc as hard as a marathon goal does. Or maybe simply getting past this treatment regime and getting any necessary orthotics (like a metatarsal gel or bump) will give me a few more years of injury-free running at whatever distance I want.

I do think that I would like to find a good program (perhaps a triathlon program) that would help me ensure I’m getting as much cardiovascularly out of low impact exercises like swimming and biking as I do from running. I really have not been this healthy since high school. BUT in high school I was only swimming – so maybe there’s a way to make it work (although then I was swimming 2 hours a day 5 days a week at a pace to train for meets).

Anyway, a lot of this is just me getting my thoughts out of my head to continue to help ferry myself along the grief cycle. We’ll see with some distance from the injury how I feel about things. I am not sure why, but this time really hit me harder than my previous injury. (Perhaps because I have a full race schedule set up this year that has now been thrown into disarray)