Start once again

Ten days have passed since I injured the calf muscle. I’ve tried to piece together what I may have done wrong so that history won’t have to repeat itself. Unlike my mistakenly progressing too quickly with my VFF usage, the errors of my ways around this particular injury are less obvious. My suspicion tells me that after cutting back so much on my running post-marathon, then pacing Cindy for the last 9 miles of her marathon was not my smartest of moves. Still, I felt fine coming out of that run.

On the day of the injury, I wore a dress and some very low heeled shoes. The heel on these shoes is so slight that most of my friends would refuse to ever call them heels of any sort. Still, I wore them and must admit that I was feeling a level of discomfort the majority of the day. When I slipped on my VFF, my feet and legs seemed to sigh with relief.

I took on the streets with a vengeance – wanting to prove to the world that I was just fine on that “perfectly normal” day. If I had been fine, I wouldn’t have pushed so hard. In truth, I was just getting by that day. All day, I’d held back the tears from feelings I have been fighting back – because I just want it all behind me. Honestly, I often feel like I’ve been abandoned and it makes me angry. It doesn’t much matter that Tom adhered to the death-do-us-part clause in the marriage contract. I’m sure the fine print said that he couldn’t die until we were both old and gray. *sigh*

I digress. This post is NOT about that day. It’s not about feeling alone and vulnerable. It’s not about financial struggles, or single parenting. It’s about injuries of a physical nature. The point I was heading to was that I ran harder than I should have. NOW, I am paying the price for that – because today, I am still hurting.

Today, after attempting and failing to run a short 3 mile run in my VFF (following a successful 4.5 mile run in shoes), I am realizing that I must approach my return to running in minimalist footwear as if I hadn’t run in VFF before. I must forget that I’ve been training exclusively and successfully in them for many months now, that I successfully ran a marathon in them, and that I even qualified to run the Boston Marathon while wearing them. I must run as if I was just starting out.

And so…I start once again.