On The Receiving End of A Hail Mary Pass

A couple of months ago I wrote a blog explaining that I had just started a truncated, basic training plan as a last ditch effort to be healed, trained and healthy enough to run the NYC Marathon on November 3^rd (and if you didn’t read that blog entry, you should; it’s riveting).  In the blog I said that this plan was my “Hail Mary” pass after I spent 13 weeks in a boot after a stress fracture in my foot that made a complete mess of my race season this year.  Well, what I didn’t think about is that if you throw a Hail Mary pass, you need to have someone open in the end zone to catch it.  And I’m not so sure that I do.

For those who didn’t grow up with a brother and then marry a man who are both obsessed with football and have no idea what I’m talking about, let me explain.  A Hail Mary pass is what football teams do when there’s about 2 seconds left on the clock, they’re down by less than a touchdown, and they are so far from their end zone that they can hardly see it.  So, when the play starts the receivers sprint the length of the field and get to the end zone while the quarterback avoids being crushed by men about twice his size, and then he chucks the ball high and far in the hopes that while one of those receivers is about to be crushed by another guy twice his size but this time just as fast, he manages to jump up and pull the ball down to score a touchdown.  The phrase originated at Notre Dame in the 1930s, when I guess they really sucked at football and would say a Hail Mary prayer to see if she could help a receiver get free in the end zone.

What on earth does all of this have to do with my marathon training?  Did they add tackling to the race just to keep it interesting?  No, though I did get pushed by a woman last time who I responded to by “using my words” as I tell my kids, though these weren’t the words that would ever come out of a kid’s mouth (and if the woman who pushed me is reading this, try using strategy to run around me rather than turning running into a full contact sport).  As most of you know, that stress fracture in the spring stopped me from running on land from April to mid-July.  In early August I started a marathon training plan, but since I couldn’t quite run yet, I decided to approach this year’s race with a run/walk technique that has been working even though I’ve been griping about it the whole time.

Well, run/walking worked until about a week ago.  After my 20 mile long run last weekend, my foot was killing me.  I have to admit that I didn’t pay much attention to it.  I had just run 20 freaking miles; every body part was killing me.  Two days after that run I did a 7 miler, and that’s when I admitted that I was in trouble.  I limped around the entire day, and it still hurt when I woke up the next morning.

Now, I’m trying to listen to my body, which by the way is really hard to do after you spend a month on crutches, almost 4 months unable to run on land, and you spend an entire triathlon season able to do roughly zero triathlons.  You want to do SOMETHING.  Your entire race season was so incredibly crappy that you just want to do this one big race and at least turn things around for yourself at the end.  Anyway, my body told me not to run on that foot, and I actually haven’t.  I replaced two 7 mile runs with deep water runs (hours of my life lost to what has to be the most boring and un-fun activity on the planet).  I was supposed to do a 14 mile long run this weekend, and I, Alison Carrie Pollock, didn’t do it.  I missed my first long run EVER by choice since I started running a bit over 4 years ago.

Now, I’m not saying I didn’t exercise.  I’m not going to listen to my body THAT much.  Instead of a 14 mile run, I spent an equivalent amount of time on my bike that I have set up on a trainer in the basement.  And since that 14 miles was supposed to be done in intervals of 4 minutes running to 2 minutes walking, that was a hell of a long time to spend a bike that didn’t go anywhere.  But, I did it.

When I got off the bike (very gingerly, and let’s just say that it wasn’t my foot that was hurting), I actually gave myself a virtual pat on the back.  The old Ali – Fat Girl – would have given up at the first twinge of pain, and instead would have enjoyed a marathon of cookies and ice cream to make herself feel better.  Oh, who am I kidding.  Fat Girl’s foot would never have hurt; she couldn’t have told you where the closest gym is let alone actually ever run a step.  And I also didn’t push it too far.  I have worked so hard to get to this marathon with two fully operational legs.  I knew that replacing a few runs with less painful things would suck right now, but may just get me to the Staten Island side of the Verranzano-Narrows bridge in a few weeks.

I haven’t run on land in 6 days, and I’ll be honest that my foot is a little sore just from standing at a bar mitzvah all day yesterday (and might explain why the Hail Mary pass might not do much for me).  I’m going to test my foot tomorrow with what is supposed to be a 6 mile training run, and we’ll see how it goes.  Maybe for luck I’ll bring a football with me.