Apparently I Also Run for Pie

It’s 5:55 a.m. and already I feel like I’m behind.  Someone tell me why I thought it’d be easier to come back on a Tuesday rather than a Monday?  Other than the fact that I’ll always take advantage of a day off, that is.  There is always that.

Thanksgiving and the days that followed did not disappoint.  And yes, I had my leftovers and they were wonderful. It does help to be house-guesting at the same time as people that have great ideas like turkey omelettes and potato pancakes.  Not that anyone was, but no one should look to me as the proper example of how to handle the spectacle that is holiday food and not gain weight. Oh, I handled it, that’s for sure.

There was one saving factor, though, and that of course was running.  Living at about 6,000 feet does have it’s advantages even for the recreational athlete. I have lived and run at almost sea level for the past five days and there is nothing better than that.  Thanksgiving morning was my first run and not twenty steps into the run I was reminded how great a feeling it is to use your 6,000 feet lung capacity at somewhere near 500 feet. I don’t know if that made sense but for a slow, non-spectacular runner like myself, any chance I get to feel like some kind of athletic superstar I will take. To run and be able to breathe easily at the same time is almost as good as pie for breakfast. Almost.

The one thing I wanted to talk about before I left but didn’t get a chance to, however, was my knee problem. Which is probably a good thing because before I left I was a little depressed by it (or couldn’t anyone tell?) and wouldn’t have had anything nice to say.  In the meantime, though, I’ve talked with my doctors (yes, plural. Doesn’t that sound all kinds of important and higher-caliber than it should?) and we’ve decided to go a more experimental route.  Over the past year the knee-pain-that-just-won’t-die has been intermittent at best but never completely goes away.  This makes for unpredictable running—well, more so than usual anyway—and a pretty unhappy runner.  I’ve watched my training time dwindle and a lot of goals get pushed away because my body wasn’t up to what I knew it could be.

So, over the next few weeks, hopefully, I’ll be getting injections of a special solution into my knee that will esentially do the job the missing cartiledge should be doing.  I know that sounds very weird to some people but it’s actually barely invasive and mostly painless.  I know a guy that can give me a bullet to bite, so I should be fine. Ha. I’m looking forward to it, though, because it will be nice to get the chance to get my body back to what I know it’s capable of doing.  That should make the next thirty days a lot easier too, because I know there’s going to be more pie. Yes, balance.