Reality Check

It all started with a dream I had last night, I was jogging during my Triathlon.  I’ve missed the wonderful and amazing feeling of my feet hitting the pavement, my fat jiggling, my lungs hurting and my body sweating like nuts.  Yes, I actually miss that.  I woke up deciding it was a sign that I’m supposed to explore jogging Sunday.   I know, I’ve never claimed to be sane, rather I’m quite comfortable with my little bit of crazy.  In my mind, I was confident since I got the green light to do my Tri that for some reason it would be okay to jog some. 

I had physical therapy this afternoon and decided it would be best to test the waters on what my PT guy Ralph would think.  I’ll never forget the look on his face when I asked him if he saw any issues with me jogging Sunday, I assured him it would just be a little bit of jogging.  He looked at me as if I told him the sky was purple with pink polka dots.  His immediate answer was absolutely not.  For some reason I thought I could compromise with him on this answer.  My question back “what if it’s just a really really slow jogging, like fat girl bay watch jogging?”.  Can you guess the answer . . . of course, NO.   He had to give me some tough love.  If I would jog Sunday, I would most likely re-sprain my ankle causing extreme damage to my foot.  He told me that my foot is just too unstable at this point to even think about jogging for a few months.  Ralph also reminded me that I need to look at the big picture and how lucky I am that I’m even able to participate.  One more bad sprain and my ankle would very likely need to be fully reconstructed and quite possibly have permanent damage with the result of not running ever again.  I’ve already been told that I may need surgery on my ankle if conservative treatment doesn’t work.   However, knowing that jogging at this point, even a little bit could end it all forever, it really got me to re-evaluate where I’m at. 

I have to be honest, I’ve been hiding myself from the truth of how bad I hurt my foot.    I have it in my head that if I just decided it’s not bad, then it won’t be bad and I can just go back to normal.   This is the same behaviour I had when we kept loosing pregnancies.  I kept just ignoring what happened and the feelings associated with it, bottling it up thinking it would go away and everything would magically be better.  Yeah, that didn’t work so well now did it?!  Normally the new Mariah would do something healthy like run, bike etc to deal with these feelings, but now I’m so limited on what I can do until my foot heals.  I refuse to go back to the Old Stoppable Mariah.  I will learn new and additional ways to cope. 

I will take one step at a time and figure this out.  I will do my Tri Sunday and I’ll let go of being worried about my time and how fast or slow I’ll be.  I WILL ENJOY the fact I get to be out there and that I’m so blessed that so many people took me up on my invitation to come out.  I can’t wait to see you and I can’t wait for YOU to see what YOU can accomplish.  My foot may slow me down, but I will continue to get stronger and stronger and more unstoppable. 

Unstoppable “reality checked” Mariah