I think I've mentioned at least a few times about how my body likes to send me messages - loud and clear messages. It seems like my ambition sometimes forgets about moderation, and limitation. The last couple of times, it's been at approximately the same time I made the exact decision for myself, to slow down and take some recovery time off running, that my body makes a bold statement. A prominent example is the very next day after I decided to drop from the marathon to the half in Victoria, my shoulder went out and I was off of running for weeks. And now again, this weekend was supposed to be my last race of 2013, a fun little 5km for me to test my speed, and my body gave up on me yesterday.
I woke up with a dull lower back pain yesterday morning, and out of caution, I stayed home from work and worked remotely on my laptop, knowing that the drive to the office would be taxing on the body. All I needed was one sneeze to send my back into spasm. It's not the worst back pain episode I've had, but it has still been rather unpleasant. I'm mobile but I need assistance to put on my socks, and any task that requires bending or sitting for extended periods of time are ones I cannot do with the ease I should. Thankfully I believe I'm in the final stages of it. My back is sore, but not in pain, and the worst of my discomfort is in my hip joints. I'm sure I'll be running again in a matter of a few days. It's quite possible I'll be feeling better as soon as tomorrow but I'm being wise and not racing this Sunday. It's simply not worth aggravating things if my body is sending me a message to take it easy. If I feel ok, I might do a light jog, but only if I feel 100% sure it's a good idea, and I'm not showing up to a race where I'll be tempted to run harder than I should. I'll play things by ear about going to intervals on Tuesday too. The funny thing about all this was that I told myself that after this weekend's race, I'd cut back a little on mileage for a few weeks, limiting my harder workouts to Tuesday interval sessions and shorter tempos, rather than also doing big long runs on the weekend, and treating myself to more cross training. Again, I did not need my body to make the decision for me.
Well, I guess my body wins over my ambition this time, and this weekend's race is a wash. I called in a favour to the race director so I can make up for missing this one with an entry to a race in 2014, making this not a total loss. It helps that I recruited a squad of volunteers for the event so he's happy to do me a favour in return. Now if only I could get my body and my ambition to communicate with one another and do one another favours too.
A poor half marathon performance last weekend followed by me bailing on a 5km race this weekend was not how I pictured ending my 2013 race calendar. But if I look back on the year overall, really, it has been one heckuva year, and I really have a lot of incredible successes to reflect on and be proud of.
Stay tuned for my review of 2013.
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