Watch Out Oprah, I Got New Feet

Three years ago I started a blog named “Beating Oprah” to raise money for the American Cancer Society and to chronicle my ultimately failed attempt, at the 2007 Chicago Marathon, to best Ms. Oprah Winfrey’s personal record at the distance (she ran a 4 hour 28 minute marathon; dang Oprah!).  Sometime after that effort I renamed the blog so as to record not only time and distance, but how I was physically feeling when I ran, what was working, what wasn’t, and occasionally, the wild thoughts and stories one conjures up while swimming through a 15 mile, Houston Summertime run.  Somewhere along the way it no longer became a priority and short of time and distance, all the other information I mined from my runs was lost.

I find myself, now three years on, back in the same spot; training for the Chicago Marathon with Houston Fall FIT.  Though I’m not really concerned with Oprah’s times any more, it is interesting to realize how some of the first posts I wrote back in Spring 2007 are applicable to today.  Back then I was starting to get some heel and knee pain and had grown so weary of it that I took the biggest step a runner can make … I switched shoe brand and type!  I wrote scandalous, love-letter like posts about how great my new Mizuno stability shoes were and about how I was looking forward to finally running healthy.

That shoe love affair was short lived though, as later on in that season my left foot broke down and I got a mean case of chronic plantar fasciitis (aka, “that foot ‘itis”).  That would start what’s dragged into years of minor injuries, minor trips to Houston’s major medical establishments, and some surprisingly great runs, along with some real stinkers.  2007’s Chicago Marathon turned out to be more Southside Houston than Southside Great Lakes; the race was cancelled due to extreme heat and I, along with most participants, was pulled off the course before completing the race.  Later that year I would stumble my way through my first ultra marathon, six months later would finish Hood to Coast (“The Mother of all Relays”), but in the 2009 Houston Marathon I set an injury plagued, dismal “personal worst” at the distance.  Surprisingly, I threw in a relatively healthy season of training for last year’s Marine Corps Marathon, and with no time goals at all, came within 100 seconds of my personal record; that record was the one I thought I would never approach again, so I was excited to be a healthy runner putting up personally healthy times.  Immediately after that race though, my right leg broke down in a major way, and I found myself back in one of those major medical buildings; will it be any different this time around?

Maybe.  After many a session of physical therapy and learning way more about how the human hip works than I reason to know, I think I have the tools to stay healthy.  “New orthotics” (that’s fancy talk for shoe inserts) were prescribed as a piece of the solution and I now sit undertrained but basically pain free and two days shy of another marathon training season with Felix and my Houston FIT peeps.   

The lessons will come hard and fast as I’ll quickly work my way up to a volume and intensity of running I didn’t achieve through spring’s short races and my various layoffs while my body adjusted to its newly re-mastered feet and right hip.   This will be my attempt to record what doesn’t work, try and lay in stone what does, and absolutely record those oh so lucid hallucinations the 21 miler, in 80 degree weather, will no doubt bring.

P.S. – I’ve removed the link to the old Beating Oprah site, because frankly it is just odd to read your thoughts from three years prior (probably should remove all the old ones on here, but for now, they will stick around).  Even if I remove them I will probably bring some back on occasion, but I will certainly not bring back the one where I said Barry White must have ran in Mizuno since they make love to your feet, no, that one is gone forever!!