Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Turkey Trotting

Alright, friends and family. It´s here. The new blog. With no posting yet, but that´ll come soon.

Turkey Trotting is where you shall now find me.

Goodbye for now, Chicks with Kicks. Hello Turkey (The country--though I do love me some turkey sandwich)!

Saturday, May 16, 2009

Rollin' Down the Pipeline...

Soon, very soon, I'll be closing Chicks with Kicks. Well, closing in that I won't be posting any longer.

I began this blog a year ago with some major goals I wanted to accomplish as well as get other runners involved in order to help me and for me to help them. The experiment didn't quite go as I expected. Oh well. Mostly, I'm stopping because I've had to shelve my running goals.

I'm going to keep writing though, because my mother appreciates it, and because I'll be expecting my students next year to blog as well. Practice what you preach!!

I'm going to begin a new blog. I think I'll call it Turkey Trotting or the like. I want to still focus on athleticism, but because we're moving to a place that will be so out of the normal for me, I think there will be a lot of things I'll want to comment on publicly for friends and family. I've not had that much to say on the Ecuador blog because I think in a lot of ways we knew what to expect here. Over there, I have no clue. I mean, sort of I do. But not really. I have no conceptual frame of reference for what we're getting in to. So I'll write about it.

I'll keep Chicks with Kicks as a link from my new blog. And who knows--maybe one day I'll go back to the experiment. But now, I feel like I can only comment on a screwed knee soooo many times, you know? And so, adieu. I'll post one last time with my new blog address. Add it to your lists :-)
Ciao or Chao (as we spell it here)
Erin

Friday, May 8, 2009

Need Oxygen

The good news, no, the great news is that I don't need surgery.
Neither does Tim, if anyone was wondering.

In fact, nothing much is really wrong with me. I have some liquid in there, and inflammation and lack of blood flow.

The bad news is that I probably won't be able to really get back to running until we leave Quito. I just can't get enough oxygen here to fully heal. I've so far been to 3 of my 10 prescribed physical therapy sessions and nothing has yet changed. I'm also considering acupunture to try to stimulate blood-flow. But the guy requires a 10 session commitment. All the cabbing really adds up!

So, goals are being shelved. That was the hardest part. I wanted to do something really big for myself for my 30th birthday, but I can't. At least, not what I wanted to do, anyway.

I'll still participate in the 15k here--a combo of running and walking, sporting this year's much cooler school team uniform. I also plan to participate in the 4k on the 4th in Boulder. If you havn't registered, DO IT!! Beyond that, I'll just be looking at 5 and 10ks, I guess. Which is fine with me now--even enjoyable. I won't have to train hard.

At this point, I'm only allowing myself some mild disappointment--looking down the barrel of 7 more weeks of waiting. My friend began chemo this week to fight a brain tumor. And when you consider that, much else ceases to be important. I'm not going to allow myself to wallow. I can still walk. I can still run even, especially when I get back to a normal altitude (Quito is at 10,000 ft. if you didn't know).

And I will still be able to do so many wonderful things in Boulder this summer. Oh, how I've missed it all! So now I'm focusing on the good things to come. I'll run this summer, but it won't be the center of my world. My friends and being outside in some Colorado sunshine will be my focus and it will be excellent!

Sunday, April 26, 2009

Waiting

Not gone. Just waiting.

I finally got in for an MRI yesterday, but I won't know the results till Tuesday or so. The orthopedic thinks it might be a meniscus fracture (a very easy and mild surgery to fix it). He can push on both sides of my meniscus, and it hurts real bad! If it's not a fracture, the meniscus simply isn't getting enough circulation/oxygen for some reason and so is inflamed. The cure? Oh, two or three weeks off. I resisted the urge to yell at him that it's been five months. Let's just see what the pictures say, first, shall we?

Interestingly, Tim has a fractured meniscus in the opposite knee. Think there's any chance of a two-for-one deal at the surgery super-store?

Saturday, March 28, 2009

Erin Concedes

Gait analysis reveals I don't pronate. Great. Fantastic. Back to the drawing board.

The chiros think it's one of two things:
I really messed myself up running hard in shoes made for pronators--they correct for a problem I don't have. Or, I'm still sort of altitude sick and cannot heal until I go back down. Still, after a year and a half at 10,000 feet, I'm still doing that high-altitude breathing thing. This could be causing nerve damage because I'm not getting enough oxygen. The second explanation makes sense when we consider that my injury changes by week and we just seem to chase it around my leg, never getting to the cause and never fully getting rid of the pain.

Sooooo.....time for the MRI. I'm going to see a knee specialist. See if he has any other ideas or agrees with the chiros. But mostly I want to see what's going on in there--see if I have any real damage or if there are clues to the cause.

If the cause really is altitude, it's something I'll just have to continue to struggle with until we leave in June.

Bye-bye, marathon.

Sunday, March 15, 2009

Gait Analysis: Last Ditch Effort

Tim and I are going to DC this week for his cousin's wedding. While there, I'm making one last attempt to heal in time to train for this marathon. I'm looking for a store where I can have a gait analysis--I'm worried I've got pronation issues and either need orthotics or different shoes or both.

When we get back from DC marks the date that I can still begin the training plan with enough time before the race. Currently, I'm running about 3 days a week, swimming two. My knee hurts me off and on, but not during running, which makes me think I must be re-doing something while running, and it hurts later because it gets inflamed. For about a week before I started running again, it was totally fine--didn't hurt at all. Now it seems to be coming back. That's why I think I may be re-injuring with my foot-plant and shoes.

At this point, I need a miracle cure--and shoes/orthotics might be it. If not, I'm going for that MRI to see if surgery is the only option left.

I'm getting to a point where I'm okay with what's going to happen. I don't think it's permanent--it can be cured. And while I might not reach my 30th birthday goal I set for this year, there's still plenty of things I can do in my 30th year of life (and beyond)--including the Intercontinental Marathon in Istanbul in October. I can run from Europe to Asia in one race. And that's rad. I also still plan on doing several shorter races in Colorado this summer. I can certainly get my fix that way too, and just work on the distance from there.

I still have hope and a good outlook. I'm thankful for what I'm able to do with my body and so I can be patient with whatever hiccup it's having right now. It'll be okay.

Monday, March 2, 2009

4 on the 4th

This post is happening now because that's how excited I am about getting back to Colorado for the summer, as soon as possible!!! I have missed Colorado, like I've missed skiing--like something has been misplaced. Like my leg.

Anyhoo, if you will be in the Boulder area on July 4th, you are coming to run Avery Brewing Company's 4 on the 4th with me! Don't worry, it's just a 4k and there's free beer. You can register at Active for, I think, $25.
This is not a suggestion.
This is what you are doing.