My runner’s watch has an event countdown feature that lets you enter the date of an event you’re training for, and then whenever you want to know how many days are left until your event, the number is there at a glance. Today, it tells me there are 98 days until the New Jersey Marathon. My right knee doesn’t have that feature, but if it did, I think it’d be giving me a somewhat larger number in the countdown to being marathon-ready.
After last week’s crappy run, I gave my knee another full week of rest. I’ve been thinking about my options for trying to keep my cardio fitness in synch with the training schedule even if I can’t run, and the options don’t come very cheap. One possibility that’s high on the list is buying an elliptical trainer, which is something Kat and I have wanted for a while anyway. The workout is pretty close to running, but a lot lower impact. Unfortunately, they’re also pretty pricey, and the ones with super-affordable price tags also tend to be a waste of even that much money.
Another possibility is gym membership, but I had one for about a year and after a while of just going because of the one machine I really liked (which is how it was after the initial “try everything” phase), the expensive membership wasn’t worth it. (I also took up running, which was another reason to stop paying dues for services I barely used anymore.)
Before giving up on the gym idea entirely, I searched YMCA locations to see if there were any nearby and got lucky. YMCA dues are a lot less than most gym memberships, so I went to check it out yesterday, hoping to find a commercial-quality elliptical trainer that would make it worth my while to sign up for a few months. They did have lots of nice-looking commercial equipment, and half a dozen or more cross-trainers, but they were all the exact same model, and 10 minutes of trying it was enough to know I’d never use that kind again. The stride was too long, and instead of the usual elliptical shape to the stride, the feet seemed to just slide back and forth in a straight line, so the overall feel was very uncomfortable. I wanted to at least get in a full workout, so I moved to a recumbent stationary bike where I planned to keep the workout going for another 45 minutes, but my butt hurt after 20 and no amount of shifting was making it better by the 35-minute mark, so I cut that one short, too. I briefly eyed a rowing machine, but figured that if my current run of luck held up, I would just do it wrong and hurt my back.
Unfortunately, this YMCA is out as a training option, because the equipment they had and me just weren’t a good fit. The good news from my YMCA workout was that as hoped, the low-impact alternatives to running did not cause any discomfort to my knee. With over a full week of rest and no problems from yesterday’s light workout, I decided to test the knee with a light run today, and made it a whole mile and half before it hurt. Dammit.
It is getting extremely frustrating to have to keep cutting workouts short, skip workouts altogether, and fall farther and farther behind in my training. I finally gave up the wishful thinking that a little extra rest and stretching would fix the knee, and have an appointment next week with a sports medicine doctor to get it checked out. I’m concerned about what this will mean for my marathon training, because 98 days - which doesn’t even count the period I won’t be training before my doctor’s appointment - is not a lot of time to get from where I’m at, to being marathon ready. My knee isn’t in bad enough shape to feel like I can even call it an “injury”, which makes me feel like I’m just being a wimp, but when I run, it hurts enough to stop me. I feel like I could run through it if it were just some pain that came up over the last few miles of a marathon, but if it’s already hurting as much as it does after a mile or two of easy running, then continuing to train and run long distances on it can’t be a good idea.
As frustrating as it is to feel like I’m falling behind from a physical training standpoint, what’s just as bad or worse is that when I can’t make the team runs, I miss out on a main part of the team experience. I’ve enjoyed the team experiences I’ve had, enough to be missing the ones I keep having to skip, which is more than half now. My preference would be to get back on track with running and be able to continue training with the teammates I’ve already met, but as the countdown ticks down, I’m starting to seriously considering adjusting my sights to just walk the marathon this time around. I haven’t met the walkers, but I’m sure they’re nice, too.
