Not normal

For three weeks I did nothing. 

OK, that's not entirely true. I cleaned about 90 percent of my house, getting down on my hands and knees to scrub spots on my kitchen floor or dust off the crown molding in my living room, getting up on a stool to clean nearly two years of dust off the ceiling fans, moving furniture around to vacuum, discovering cat hair seven months after Lucy left this mortal coil. I'd call that something.

I wrote places other than here, filling an old college notebook while revisiting my 2011 job search that landed me back where I belong (mom said I should keep a job search journal, but she never said when precisely to write in it). I wrote in another notebook, musing on my failures at love and pondering in my training journal what was next physically after figuring out what was wrong with me physically.

I didn't shower very much because I had no reason to, not when I felt paralyzed by my own body. In three weeks I showered maybe three times (and can document each one); my co-workers never complained, not to my face anyway. I didn't shave, either, but that's not news because I constantly work on about two weeks' worth of scruff.

I read a few issues of five years of Sports Illustrated and three years of Esquire magazines, but back issues of Inside Triathlon and Lava remain unread; in my state I couldn't bear to read about those pursuits on hold.

I ate like shit, when I bothered to eat. After checking out the Monsanto shit list I decided to make some changes, though I'll finish off the GMO-laden crap I already bought. The changes went out the window that day in July. Breakfast was no more than one bowl of cereal and a couple swigs of apple juice to wash down my multivitamin and my ecinacea. A Starbuck's foo-foo drink often constituted lunch or dinner, and when it didn't I ate the minimum. What was the point, I figured, when I wasn't burning calories anyway?

One night, in a span of three hours I talked myself into and out of climbing Mount Evans. I decided I would make the hike, started assembling the minuscule supplies required for one of the easiest of Colorado's 14ers, but then assessed my mental state and figured I'd fuck it up somehow, ending up a cautionary tale meriting a brief in the print media and 20 seconds on the evening news.

Just for the record, I decided on my own to take time off. Fresh in my mind, that feeling of an ice pick jabbing my back kept me from running, my travails with the bike — which include a wreck — kept me away from my two-wheeled implement (though I did my share of around-town work on my mountain bike, which affords a relatively comfortable upright position), and the prospect of rotating and lifting my head kept me out of the water. So mere fear kept me away from those things I loved.

Now I have an idea of what junkies on the nod feel like, walls closing in, heightened senses,  muscles twitching involuntarily. It was some of the worst sleep I've ever had, and I can't remember a single dream in that time. I laid my head on the pillow, feeling some electric jolts through the jumbled and frayed nerves in my neck, and woke up to some of the same sensations. I felt like my heart and lungs had been amputated. I never cried and I never thought about hurting myself, but I found myself with even less patience than normal and in the kind of funk that scares the crap out of a truly mindful person. 

The few things I did remotely construed as social meant nothing. I was a zombie, sitting there on the patio at the brewery and trying to crack wise with my friends. I didn't talk to my parents for about three weeks, and I normally call once a week. I didn't really go out, except to fill one of my two beer growlers. Twice I drank 64 ounces of beer in one sitting (good microbrew, lest you think I go for the cheap stuff in times of trouble. I just didn't feel like talking to anyone. I felt as vacant inside as I-80 across Nebraska. Yet I just had to deal with this on my own, without my normal coping mechanisms and with a lot of thoughts swirling around in the vast recesses of my mind.

The light at the end of the tunnel was the green scrawl on my refrigerator greaseboard: a doctor's appointment at 11:30 a.m. Monday, August 19. 

Under construction

Appropriately enough, orange cones, barrels and temporary traffic signs surround my city. As I turn the corner from Third Street on to Parsley Boulevard, orange and white fencing blocks the bridge over I-80. Turns out a truck hit the bridge at speed in April, prompting the appearance of cones and barrels the past four months. Now a crane towers over the bridge; I assume WYDOT wants to finish it before snow flies next month.

I take a different way, then, to get west of town; Parsley Boulevard to College Drive to Southwest Drive spares me Lincolnway, the main east-west drag through town, and without that option I now have to go north out of my subdivision with a left on Lincolnway. Most of the time that route occurs without incident, though I know the punk in the dually next to me would love to flatten me. Once I get under I-80 and I-25 on Lincolnway, it becomes Otto Road, a nice out-and-back that terminates under I-80 again. But now the road is covered with gravel; it was chip-sealed a couple of weeks ago and gravel does not hold up 7/8-inch-wide tires cranked to 115 psi.

That leaves east of town, the perils of which I documented here, and north of town, which is all right when traveling perpendicular to the wind. Otherwise, another nearby road under construction hems in my little neighborhood as well, making south of town nearly impossible (packed with traffic past the Safeway plaza).

So it seems as good a time as any to pull the plug on my season. Come on, right? A little construction shouldn't stop a determined enough athlete. No, not until the athlete is under construction.



For the fourth consecutive year I had to bail on my final race of the season. Last year I strained the soleus muscle in my left calf one week after finishing Ironman Lake Placid. In 2011 a job change and general malaise forced me out of the Harvest Moon Half-Ironman. In 2010, I got sick four days before that same race, sick enough that a Half-Ironman in my weakened condition would have led to some bad shit down the road.

This time, I thought I had things turned around through July. I had solid if unspectacular workouts that would have gotten me to the start line unscathed and fairly psyched. On Friday, July 26, I did a short run followed by a 1h15 ride, during which I noticed a little pain in my neck. For months since my bike wreck I figured a couple bolts got loosened and something got out of adjustment, which affects the fit of my bike by even a minuscule amount. No problem, I thought, I can get through the Boulder Half-Ironman on this fit, then I won't ride my bike the rest of the year. On Saturday, July 27, I woke up and headed out for a 1-hour run. I lasted three minutes before a point just right of my left shoulder blade tightened up, feeling like a stab from an ice pick every stride. Within hours, the pain in that spot radiated across my entire upper back, and within hours after that immobilized my neck as well. I dealt with this through the end of Saturday and all of Sunday before the pain subsided a bit early on in the week, but not enough to allow me to race. I figured the worst thing I could do would involve folding myself into a praying mantis position for three hours followed by two hours (or more) of ground-pounding on an unshaded course.

I've spent much of the past couple of weeks in consultation and research for the next step. It's clear I've done little enough maintenance on my body over nearly 40 years that it's time to prepare for the next 40 years. Do I want to spend that time in traction or in action? I've chosen the latter, because I hear what others my age complain about — my back, my sciatica, my this, my that — and I don't want that quality of life. So I'm surrounded by cones and barrels. I have an appointment with an osteopath in a week-and-a-half, partially to pinpoint (ouch) the root of my neck spasms but mostly to establish some kind of routine maintenance for my body as I continue to challenge it to do more and be better.

The sign above describes the next several months. Once I get myself to where I can get out on the roads again (that's a "when," not an "if," I don't care how many medical professionals I have to see), it'll be time to get to work. For now it's a different kind of work, this business of saving my career as an athlete. It's also a matter of saving my sanity; I haven't done anything in nine days, and while I've taken time off before this limbo is particularly maddening. I don't know precisely what's wrong with me, so I have to abstain to save any further damage. And I will take as much time off as I need for the short term to preserve my chances in the long term.

Physically, it sometimes hurts when I train. Mentally and spiritually, it ALWAYS hurts when I don't train. Right now I can't do anything but stew over stuff I need to really think through — stuff I think about on the roads.

All of which are now under construction.

"Runners run. It's how we deal with stress. It's where we talk with God. Whenever something goes wrong, runners run."

Chris Jons, former University of Wyoming runner.