Almost exactly a year ago my wife and I took our second trip to Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park. We’d last visited 12 years earlier in October, and so had missed the opportunity to see puffins. I’d meant to make a series travelogue posts about my trip, but I got busy with programming, work, video games, and playing D&D with the kids so I fell uncharacteristically behind on tagging and editing my photos. I finally got around to editing the photos from the trip. First up, a selection of photos taken by my wife.

Back in December, before I was having any issues that made me think I was going to have to quit running, I signed up for the Dunedin Rotary Club Triathlon. It would be my first ever Triathlon. (It may end up being my only Triathlon) I set up a Garmin 12-week training plan and, when the time came, I started my training. I was feeling pretty good as the date approached. Unlike many others doing Triathlons, I’ve been swimming my entire life. Not to get ahead of myself, but this is reflected in my 2nd place ranking for the swim portion of the Triathlon.

Last year when I was looking at potential competitions to participate in, it saw that RipIt Events had a Duathlon pretty close to the house. I figured it’d be neat to try out a Run-Cycle-Run event. This would end up being my first competitive cycling event. However, it was scheduled for about ¾ of the way through my Triathlon training so I figured that I would be nice and trained up for the cycling portion.

It’s been a while since we last went to Disney; five years, in fact. We were originally supposed to go in 2020, but then, a week before our trip, Disney closed for COVID-19. Finally it was time to go back and boy have things changed. Back when we just had Scarlett, I wrote a blog post about Visiting to Disney with a 2-year-old and another about Visiting to Disney with a 3-year-old. While I don’t intend for this blog post to be nearly as formal as those entries, they do serve as a contrast for this trip.

Once again I participated in the Bigfoot 5 and 10 mile race near my house. However, I think this will truly be the last time. I didn’t fall this time, but it seems that no matter how carefully I step, this trail is designed to make me roll my ankle. I rolled it twice to the point where it hurt and a couple times that didn’t hurt. As I write this post near the end of race day (it will not be published until the new year), my foot is not throbbing and it doesn’t hurt to walk, so I think it was strained a bit, but not sprained (thank goodness).

Since I didn’t cover running last year, I’m going to cover both years in this post.

2021

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you know that I caught the running bug during the Red Hat Summit in 2019. My original goal was to do an official race that would allow me to qualify for a good spot at a Run Disney race. Then COVID-19 hit and killed in-person racing.

Because of various issues I wrote about before (mostly stemming from the issue with my right sesamoids), I ended up canceling my summer and fall races. The last one I was really looking forward to was the Ted Corbitt 15k, honoring Mr. Corbitt who has a long list of achievements, including being the first African-American to run the Olympic Marathon event and being a founding president of the New York Road Runners. This was to be my final competitive road race of 2022.

The Percy Sutton Harlem 5K was both the next race I’d registered for after the Front Runners LGBT Pride Run, and the first race after my doctors cleared me to start running again (“for reals this time”) after an X-Ray and MRI to make sure things were OK in that tiny area under the big toe where there’s so much going on. Both doctors told me to ease myself back into running. They also both gave me the metric of using the next day’s presence or absence of pain as a way to tell if I was doing OK. After the past couple months of trying things out, I’ve come to the conclusion that the best shoe for me is the New Balance 860. Since my old one was worn out (which is why I switched to the 1080 for the BK Half - which may (at least partly) be the reason for my injury), I got myself a new pair at the New Balance store located inside the NYRR RunCenter when I went to pick up my bib. I also took advantage and had them confirm my shoe size while I was there. For this race I chose to run with a dancer pad since my podiatrist is making me new orthotics with a cutout, both doctors suggested at least starting out using it, and I’d learned a new position for the pad that kept my sesamoid area safe while not causing me pain in the other toes. Bad placement of the pad caused me pain during the Pride Run.

As I mentioned in my Setbacks post, I’ve injured my foot. At first I thought it was metatarsalgia, but it’s a closely related issue - sesamoiditis. My podiatrist cleared me to attempt a run after a week and predicted things would be fully healed by 2 weeks in. There were 2 key changes I had to make. First, I had to change out the shoes I wear daily to work - I’d chosen a New Balance model that didn’t have a rigid enough sole. Second, I had to wear dancer pads while recovering. As opposed to the metatarsal pad I’d originally sought out from CVS, it doesn’t cushion the area receiving pressure. Instead it puts the pressure everywhere else. More about that later. I spoke with the coach I’m using to get ready for the Marathon and we agreed that I could try and run the race, but had to keep my pace lower to reduce the chance of injury.

This morning it suddenly hit me why this injury has messed with my head so much. I realized that “runner” has become a part of my identity and now I’d temporarily (hopefully) lost access to that part of myself.