What the Hell Happened at the Gold Coast Marathon

Good lord, do I love the ocean. The sound, the smell, the beauty, the crashing waves, the sand. I love all of it. And as I sit here with a wall-to-wall view of the Pacific, crashing down on the beautiful white sand of the Gold Coast of Australia, all I can do is cry. My face is swollen and my eyes burn. It's been a hellish day. Despite the beautiful view, my heart is truly heavy and my knee is wrapped in bags of frozen Australian peas (way cheaper than buying actual ice packs). I've traveled to the other side of the world to run a marathon tomorrow. Instead I'll be coming home, my head hanging low, medal-less and feeling like a failure.

While on this trip, (which, to be clear, was mostly about coming to Sydney for work - the marathon leg was an added bonus) I've been reading this lovely book, which was a gift from my fabulous, insightful sister-in-law.

In it, Murakami talks a lot about how running has defined him as a person. It's probably hitting a little too close to home at the moment, but his words are really quite poignant. He goes as far as saying that running has made him the person he is. Who he is, is a novelist. He's not a professional runner and is, by no means, breaking any speed records in his age group, or anything of the sort. Rather, he has just made a commitment to running throughout his life and feels that that commitment to his health has made a huge difference.

Murakami started running at the age of 33, as he was writing his first novel. To him, those things go hand-in-hand. One physical challenge, one mental. I, on the other hand, started running just after my daughter was born, when I was 27. It was a fairly desperate attempt to lose the last of the stubborn baby weight that I couldn't seem to shake. It was a few hundred yards at first, that, over time, grew and grew until I discovered racing and long distance running. And over the years, like Murakami also mentioned, it has waxed and waned depending on what has been going on in my life. But it's always been there to some degree or other.

For me, running has always been tied to motherhood. I don't know how to explain it exactly, but I think I had a fear that motherhood meant the end of something. Freedom? Individuality? Good health? Vitality? I don't know. But I do know that there is nothing like pregnancy and your postpartum body to make you feel like an overweight hippo trying to do ballet. It was important to me to still be able to achieve things, try new things and do things I didn't think were possible after having my kids. I've always felt like that was important.

Running helped me feel like I still had control over something. Like, despite the weight of the expectations of being a mom, which can be heavy as hell, I could still do something good for myself. Something healthy. Something with goals and positive outcomes. Something that I had never done before. It also gave me the mental space to take a deep breath and then come back to my kids refreshed and revitalized and feeling strong, even if it was only a half an hour away from them.

Running also connected me to my husband. It was something we talked about on our first date, comparing notes about which races we had run. Soon we were running together, something we both love to do. Something way healthier (and cheaper!) than going out to eat or sharing a bottle of wine (both of which we still did and still do, but you know, healthy balance and all). So when we challenged each other to run a marathon, it was all the better because we were doing it together.

Now we've set ourselves the goal of running the six World Major Marathons - New York, Chicago, Berlin, London, Tokyo, Boston. With New York and Chicago done, and our trip to Berlin all paid for, it's feeling like me might actually get there.

So when the opportunity to come to Australia for work came up, the silly thought to run a marathon here came to me. It was a new continent. Why not? I thought to myself. And my amazing, brilliant, kind (and horribly jealous) husband completely supported the idea. It meant that I would be away for days longer than my work commitment and it wouldn't be cheap. But what an opportunity.

I'm glad to say that training went close to perfectly. None of my old injuries has come back to bother me. The knee pain (other leg than the one bothering me now) that I was experiencing at the Chicago Marathon last fall, which in the end was really a calf problem, was under control. I felt great. My longest run was 20 miles and it went so well that I was completely confident that I was going to PR here in Australia. And then...

My husband and I were running the first of two taper runs that I had planned, two weeks before the marathon, a few hours before I boarded the plane to Sydney. The goal was 12 miles. Around mile 9.5 I felt a strange pain on the side of my right thigh. It was sudden and pretty severe and in the interest of not injuring it further, we decided to walk the rest of the way home. It didn't hurt at all after I stopped running and I pretty much forgot about it. Made the trip down under and happily got to work with my global marketing team.

A few mornings later, I got on the hotel treadmill (it's winter in Australia so it stays dark until 7am or so, so it was too early for an outside run in a city I wasn't familiar with) to bang out 3 or 4 miles. Immediately, my leg hurt. Badly. I got off and rode the bike for awhile without pain, frustrated but thinking that it just needed a few more days to heal up. I skipped my next mid-week run, wanting to be sure I could do my last 8 mile taper run on the weekend. But the weekend came and went with no running. And every day, my leg hurt a bit more, even when I wasn't running. Eventually it settled into my knee- pain behind the knee cap and along the outside of my leg. Still I held out hope. I bought bags of frozen peas (I'm seriously keeping the Australian pea market in business) and iced it twice a day. I bought some KT tape and experimented with a few different ways of taping it to see if it would make a difference. By the time I had to fly to Gold Coast for the marathon I had basically decided that I was just going to run in pain. I had done it before in Chicago, I didn't see how this would be any different.

But over the last two days, it's all fallen apart. The pain has gotten so bad that it wakes me up at night when I turn over or move around. When I stand up after sitting, my kneecap throbs with pain so badly that I can't move for a minute until it settles down. This morning, in a last hopeful, desperate attempt to make it work, I suited up and tried to run. I could barely manage a hobble down the paved path that runs alongside the beach. Runner after runner passed me. Beautiful, long-legged runners with perfect speed and bouncy, pain-free strides. I wanted to kick all of them. I wanted to push them over and scream that they didn't know how good they have it. (Mature reaction, I know). Instead, I sat by the beach and cried, knowing that it was over.

So now, I'm leaving. I have to catch an Uber to the airport at 3am tomorrow morning. I could leave a bit later, but the roads all close at 3:30 for the marathon. The route goes right by my hotel, which is one of the reasons I chose it. Instead of heading to the starting line, full of excitement and energy and optimism, I will throw my giant suitcase into a stranger's car and leave on a series of flights that I've paid over $1,000 to change so that I can get home a day earlier. Sounds crazy, but I need to get to a doctor and I'm pretty sure that watching the runners go by would just about kill me. And I miss my husband and kids. It's been two weeks since I've seen I've seen them and the homesickness has really settled in.

I know that running doesn't make me who I am, exactly. But I've never felt such a profound sense of loss about not being able to do it. After a perfect training season, my expectations were so high. I have been dreaming of that feeling of crossing the finish line and achieving something that I still consider amazing. Part of that amazing feeling IS about doing it as a mother. Motherhood, like running, does not exactly make me who I am. But in a way it heightens these experiences. Makes them more incredible since the list of things I juggle is exponentially higher than it used to be. And I want my kids to be proud of me. I know that they don't think in those terms yet. They love me regardless of my job or my writing or my running. They love me because I'm me, no matter what defines me. I know my husband is proud that I had the courage to come to the other side of the world, on my own, to do this. He is no less proud because I won't actually run the race.

I read once that the race is the celebration, not the goal. It's the party after the grueling work you put into training. Well, hell, I want the damn party. I've earned it. I feel ripped off. Lots of my friends have reached out since I've said I've dropped out of the race, with incredibly hopeful and inspiring messages. Everyone understands the disappointment. No one thinks I've failed, other than me- my harshest critic. I know I will get over this, that it's just a race. There are bigger, more important things. Like the Berlin Marathon, a mere 85 days from now. Eyes on the prize.

*****Update*****

Well, I wish I could say that things are looking better. After I was repeatedly delayed, rerouted and rebooked, I completed the 41+ hour nightmare of a trip home, that involved spending 8 hours waiting in the Sydney airport for space on a flight and a brief and unexpected stop in Hawaii. By the time I got home I was exhausted, starving (no vegan food on flights that you book at the last minute), and in horrible pain. I immediately made an appointment with my orthopedist who told me that I most likely have a stress fracture in my femur.

"So...I've been walking around on a broken leg?" I asked him.

"More or less!" he said, with a smile. (He's maybe the most cheerful doctor I've ever met. He gives bad news like he's telling you that you've won the lottery.)

"Ok," I said. "A stress fracture, so that's what, like 6 weeks of recovery and then I'm fine? I'll be ok to run Berlin?"

"Noooo. 12 weeks minimum recovery. As little weight on your leg as possible. You'll need a leg brace and crutches and then you can start to maybe see if you are able to gently get back into some mild cardio." I told him he was my least favorite person ever. He didn't take it as an insult.

And just like that, the dream of running the World Majors slips significantly further away. Once again, our trip is already paid for. It's too late to back out. So we'll go to Berlin. But I most likely won't be running. The diagnosis isn't 100%. I'll need an MRI to confirm (an MRI which my insurance is currently fighting me on. Somehow, the possibility of a broken leg doesn't worry them). But all signs are pointing to the stress fracture. In any case, I won't be running for quite awhile.

Now I'm in Florida with my kids to visit my parents. They are having a blast, swimming in the pool and planning a trip to Disney while I am resting with my leg in a brace trying to figure out how to rent a wheelchair so that I might be able to go with them.

I'm trying not to feel broken and like I've lost something vital, but that's exactly how I feel. I've been googling "runner recovery from femur stress fracture" and people do bounce back. I know that I will because, like I told the doctor, I love running. It makes me happy, it keeps me sane. It will just take time. Lots of time. Starting now...