I’m feeling really depressed. The pain in my left hip & groin is worse again, 4-5/10 now. I don’t know if the pain is worse again from this morning’s run or from sitting at my desk or driving: but as much as I can reduce the sitting & driving to the minimum necessary, I cannot avoid it, so this isn’t going to get better any time soon.
I think this is a real injury: I felt I pulled something in my left groin while doing Sun Salutations last week, on Wednesday 8/27, before heading out for my solo trip to South Dakota. I probably reactivated an old injury from a decade ago. And during COVID, I had a very severe episode of hamstring tension/inflammation from all the sitting and because all I could do during the shutdown was run & hike, and that lasted for months: literally for months all I could do was walk, nothing else at all. So this doesn’t bode well.
I cannot “take it one day at a time”: I need to make a decision for myself now to not run for the rest of this week, lest I also ruin my trip to Alaska next week.
This is devastating for me. All this year I’ve been working to finally do my first full marathon, after having missed “my chance”, my wish last year, and I’m missing it again. I’ve failed again. None of my runner friends get so many injuries and setbacks as I do, so I must be doing something wrong. I feel like I’ll never go beyond the half-marathon. And even there, when I race, I’m performing much worse that the projections, whereas my friends perform just as expected.
Running is all I have. It helps me regulate, it brings me joy, it gives structure to my days, my weeks. My job is uncertain, my relational needs are often unmet in painful ways, climbing depends on others and that often backfires. Running is the only thing I could do without depending on others, without the risk of being let down by others.
But now it’s my own body letting me down.
Sometimes mental pain can cause pain in the body.
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