The Good News...and the Bad

On Friday, I went to the podiatrist.  At first, I feared it was going to turn into yet another one of those doctor visits I hate and the reason I tend to shun them off completely.  Like a good patient, I filled out all the paperwork in advance.  Once in the room though, the assistant girl started asking me all the same questions verbatim.  About half way through, I was tempted to say, "Can't you just type this stuff from other those papers sitting in front of you?"  I held my tongue though. 

During the actual exam of my foot, I ended up confusing myself.  As she was pressing and pulling on all different areas and asking me if it hurt, I kept saying no.  At one point though, it was started to hurt but I wasn't sure if it was just if she was pressing really hard or if it truly felt different.  In the end, I ended up being sent for X-rays to check for a stress fracture and a follow-up appointment today with instructions to stop running, ice it and use Bio-Freeze on it until the results came back.

I stuck to the rules.  On Saturday, I spent 12 hours away from home acting as spectator and support crew for the JFK 50.  It was a blast.  At one point, our 'crew' outnumbered our number of runners but everyone knew quite a few people actually running so it was fun to try to catch as many as we could while still staying with our three actual runners whose stuff we had.
 
During the start of the race, one friend noticed a guy starting to run and carrying his bag of stuff.  She offered to take it for him.  All we had was his bib number and we were going to look for him along the course and if we couldn't find him, just take the stuff to the finish line.  Turns out, the people he was with must have just taken off without him.   

At the first stop where family/friends are allowed, we found all our runners and shortly after ended up finding runner 1076, mysterious green bag guy.  I can't believe we actually found him but we ended up being able to catch him at each station as he was just a few minutes behind everyone else we were helping.  This means he was able to change shoes when he needed, get whatever candy, food, etc. he needed out of his bag.  He was quite grateful.  The memory card on his camera was also full so we played photographer as well saying we'd try to find him at the end and exchange info.

I honestly had no desire to run JFK previously.  It has become insanely expensive over the past few years and the thought of 26 miles on that towpath sounded terrible.  We were on it for about 14 miles during Freedom's Run marathon and I was dying to get off it by the end of just 14 miles.  It's flat and monotonous.  I ran the Appalachian Trail section several times over the summer and enjoy it, although cussing at the rocks is inevitable.  Therefore, I really didn't have it on 'my list'.  Of course, that all changed after spending the whole day there Saturday.  I'll probably have to do it.

Somehow we missed our group of people actually finish, ending up at the finish about a minute late.  We were there to catch number 1076 though.  After getting a photo, I attempted to scribble my number and e-mail on a piece of tape for him.  Luckily, it worked, he was able to read the e-mail address and now has the few pictures we were able to take.  Turns out his friends finished almost 2 hours ahead of him and I guess just ditched him at the start.

Over the weekend, my foot continued to feel bad.  Just taking the dogs for a walk and it would start to feel funny again.  I was fearing the worst.  Then, today, I had absolutely no pain.  Although, due to the rain, I actually haven't done anything, not even a walk.  I went for my follow up appointment today and luckily there is no evidence of a stress fracture.  She was going to give me an injection but I really didn't want it (although she did explain it to me and it wasn't what I thought it was going to be so it sounded better than my initial reaction of 'no way') but agreed that I didn't need it if I already felt it was getting better.  Therefore, the good news is I'm probably just fine.  The bad news is I probably should have just given it more time on my own.  Lesson learned...again!  What did I say in the last post about rushing off too soon?  It had been over a month though...guess it just didn't really help that I continued to try to run on it for that long (and do a 50K).