Completing the Half-Marathon Challenge (aka Oh My Achin' Coccyx)

“I didn’t even know you owned a car,” said a fellow elementary school mom. "I never see you driving."

I hear this a lot. But actually, I do own a car. I just don’t use it very often. 

If I’m going somewhere in town,  I’m usually doing it on foot. Most likely pushing a kid in a jogger. We ride bikes or run to school, the grocery store, the library, the park. I like what it teaches my kids: there’s a self-determination to it, an invitation to define their own limitations. I also like knowing I can get where I need to go through the power of my own locomotion, and I want my kids to trust that about themselves too.

Which is why, five days before the last half-marathon of my birthday month challenge, it was so not in the plan to pass out in the laundry room and have a seizure.

I regained consciousness because I heard a woman's distressed voice saying “I think she’s seizing! I think she’s having a seizure!". Turns out that was my mom talking to my husband. He was holding me in his arms, thinking (he told me later) that he was watching me die. 

I still don’t know what happened. I started to feel like I had to puke so I went to the bathroom. When I came out, I fainted, dropping full-force to the tile floor on my tailbone. 

May I say definitively and slowly: OOOOUCH. Pain in the coccyx feels like someone punched you from the inside out. The image that comes to mind is my tailbone rotting inside me like a damaged tuber.

It’s very strange to go from feeling totally and happily in control of your body, to feeling as if you are a mere backseat driver… a backseat driver who was just kicked to the curb. It is confusing and more than a little scary. Is this what it will feel like to get older? A slow relinquishment of control over this vessel that allows me to have experiences?

I had been feeling very good prior to this "episode" so I did lots of bargaining with myself, lots of wishing I could ignore it. But fainting is not usual for me, neither are seizures, so I went to the doctor and had some blood tests.

Nothing conclusive was found. Stress? Adrenal shutdown? The body is mysterious.

After four days with no reoccurances, I talked to my doctor and got the clearance to do the last half-marathon… under one condition: someone would need to chaperone me. And handstand practice was banned until further notice. 

Life as a whitewater river guide for thirteen-plus years taught me—perhaps a little too well—how to live with discomfort. I’m not gonna say my ass felt good running those final 13.1 miles, but I am still glad I did it. My husband biked the first three miles with me but ran the rest of it by my side. We ran on the National Forest road that winds through the oaks, madrones, and pines behind our house in California. I was s-l-o-w but that made it easier to converse with my man.  

 

Birthday Month Half-Marathon challenge= done. Insert high-kick here.

Lessons learned: 

1. My left knee doesn't really love running that far every weekend

2. My mind really does. 

3. My life is better when I have a solid goal in my life, but better still when I have solid people in my life. 

4. Being stubborn is a positive attribute when it comes to running.

5. Happy is a crappy running song because it just makes you want to stop and dance.

Getting help with the candles on my b-day cake