This past week, I had a stomach issue of grand proportions. It started on Friday, when I left my placement. I was eating the second half of my lunch on the way to the movies, because they eat lunch at like 11:30, and that is way too early, and while I was eating, my stomach started to feel off. Initially it felt more like a hunger pain than anything, so I did not think much of it. The unfortunate thing was that the movie ticket I bought was for Scream VI in the 4DX theater. For those unfamiliar with the 4DX theater, it is basically like taking a kids rollercoaster ride. The chair moves, there are things that will poke you in the back, and it will spray water and smells at you. It is a weird experience, but it is definitely not one to sign up for when your stomach is not feeling great. Nonetheless, I went and had a good time, but I was ready to go home to eat a grand meal, and to hopefully make my hunger pain go away. As I was eating, I made it about halfway through my meal, before I realized that I was not having a hunger pain. The rest of the night I battled with nausea but survived without having any incidence, just a lack of sleep.
When I woke up Saturday, it seemed like I was not going to be able to get a successful run in for the day, so I lounged around all day, and I got one mile in late in the afternoon when I was feeling a little better. I was hopeful, that I could get up Sunday and be able to run over the top route with my crew, but after rolling around on the floor, I could not muster the intestinal fortitude to attempt a 20 mile run, but I had Spring Break from Syracuse University this past week, so I thought I could recover the lost weekend with the added time, and I would go for the same long run Monday or Tuesday.
Sadly that is not how this story played out. I continued to have stomach issues, I kept feeling bloated and gassy, and worst of all, I kept feeling like volcano preparing to erupt, acid would feel like it was slowly climbing up to the bottom of my esophagus, and this was especially the case when I tried to run. I could only make it a mile or two, before the sensation would start, and it hurt a little to breath, and then I would proceed to start gagging. I was almost tempted to just keep running until I threw up just to hopefully feel better after. So for a week, in the heat of Boston training, the best runs I was able to muster were two four milers. One of which was in the blizzard and was basically a non-run anyway due to the speed and stopping that were involved. Finally, something in my stomach clicked on Wednesday, and the poison was being released from my body, and my recovery commenced, but man it was a dark week.
We can start with the funny though. One thought that always starts to pop into my head when I am unable to run due to injury or illness, is to get my hair cut, and to cut all my facial hair off, and to do something to the way I look. I have no idea why, but this ALWAYS happens. When I hurt my hip/back last fall, I completely shaved my face for the first time since I had moved up to New York, so it had been like two years, but no one really got to see it because I was not running or going out, because not running is depressing, and it makes me not want to see anyone.
If I were to try and psychoanalyze my own behavior in this instance, I would say that it has to do with control over my body. When I am injured or sick, there is only so much I can do to try and fix it, there is not firm control, there is no on/off switch for an injury, but something that is easily controllable is facial hair and hair on the top of my head, so I am guessing I am mentally doing my best to find some part of my body that I can control, and maybe if I change that everything else will change. It sounds a little ridiculous, but I am almost positive that that is what is going on here.
Running, and exercise in general, is known to be a big endorphin releaser, and this is why exercise and happiness and mental wellness are so closely linked. I would also argue that doing it enough also leads to a level of addiction, that is sometimes partially unhealthy. As a regular runner, and someone who does at least eight miles a day, and often times more, like on the weekends it can get up to twenty miles, taking that away in any capacity is life altering.
I literally spend so much of my time contemplating when I am going to run, how far I am going to run, what pace would be good to run, and all of these thoughts are fine, but then when it gets hyper focused on the thought of will I be able to run, and that thought is so much more stressful than any others, and it weighs heavy on my stagnant body and brain. So then when I am not running, I just do not feel like myself. It is such a defining personality trait that then when I am not running, it makes me not want to go out and do things with others, especially if they are my friends from running.
It is basically like some kind of shame or embarrassment from not being able to run. At the end of the day, no one else really cares except for me, but it is one of those things, where the mentally is debilitating. Not that while having this stomach illness I was going to go out and hang with people, because I felt awful, but when it is an injury, and I am perfectly capable of going out, I almost always choose not to, and just go MIA for a month till I am better.
Then comes the negative mindset toward my running ability. It starts to feel like every day I miss, is the equivalent to adding one minute per mile to my pace. It feels like all of the fitness I have been working so hard to build is falling off my bones, as I turn into a sedentary sack of evaporating endurance. Even more so this week, because it is an important time in Boston training. It felt like missing two workouts and a long run are going to completely ruin my race. In reality, I know this is not true, but it is so easy to feel like it is the end of the world, but at least this feeling is a little less so while sick, because I feel so awful, so injuries are worst. Either way, they both have a similar effect on the mind.
One other running specific thing that seriously affects the mindset is Strava. What is normally the most fun social media app, now becomes the least fun. I know everyone else is running, and in some cases, I know how far they are running, or that they are doing a track club workout, but there is something about actually seeing it that makes it worst. So I have to stay off of Strava when I am unable to run, because it just makes me more depressed. Also you can tell when I have been hurt or sick for a while, because my logs become shorter and shorter, and then I stop writing them all together. It is feels okay to post a couple of negative posts in a row about not being able to run far or fast, but once it has happened a few days, it just feels better to let it lay silent as just “afternoon run.”
So I guess at the end of the day, it is a little bit better to be sick, because then the mindset is not as bad, because the rest of the body feels terrible, and typically with an illness, some level of running can be done, whereas injuries your mental clarity is better, so one can dwell in their sadness more. There is a silver lining, that I can watch more movies when sick, but even then, you can only watch so many movies in a day, before you feel like it is wasted, and you can only do so many things in a day that are not running, before you feel like it is wasted. Basically running is a little too defining of a personality trait for me, but I love it so no regrets!
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