Only Myself to Blame and Forgive

Plus, a bittersweet Ann Trason flashback and a gratitude list

Hi all,

I’m spending Thanksgiving week in Los Angeles with my daughter and in-laws. I registered for their neighborhood’s Turkey Trot 5K, planning to make it a kick-ass high-intensity speed workout, part of a well-laid plan to resume weekly speed sessions and build my cardio engine for the Napa Valley Marathon in early March. Running an uptempo 26.2 at Napa, aiming to BQ, would be a 30th anniversary celebration of my first life-changing marathon there in 1995. It also would turbo-charge my fitness for the summer mountain ultras to follow.

Alas, plans change, shit happens. No turkey trot. No marathon.

My MRI result from last week reveals I am one stubborn and stupid runner.

My determination to run long on November 2 partially but significantly tore the IT band attachment off the head of the tibia. When I felt burning pain around mile 50 in my effort to run a sub-24 100-miler (as described in this post), I thought, “I’ll at least make it a 100K if I can’t make it 100M,” and I limped 12 more miles.

I thought I had severe inflammation. But when my friend Jennifer, who reads this newsletter, saw the photo I posted of a bruise on the sore spot—a bruise caused by internal stress and perhaps bleeding, not from banging it externally—she told me to go to a doctor.

The orthopedist told me to get totally off the leg until I could get an MRI and detect whether it’s a tendon tear, bone bruise, start of a stress fracture, or some combo of all three. He wanted me on crutches for two weeks to promote healing, then I could start to wean off crutches.

It gets better, I mean stupider.

I lasted only about three days on the crutches. Did you know that crutches are highly inconvenient? Sure, if I had my leg fractured in a cast, then I’d know that I really needed them. But I could walk pretty OK on this “inflammatory issue,” as I thought of it, so I ditched the crutches and walked, repeating an old adage in my head, “movement is medicine.” I thought, I can do low-impact squats without bothering it too much, so I’ll do a bunch of squats!

Thursday, the day before the MRI results arrived, I did an uphill hike on my treadmill (which felt about 80 percent good and normal) and tried just one minute of slow jogging. Pain told me I can’t do any high impact movement like jumping or even baby-step jogging. To my credit, I stopped trying to shuffle-run after that one minute. But, ridiculously, attempting to run hurt within the first 10 seconds, and I made myself keep going for the full minute. Just because I always round up, I always try to do a little more.

When I saw the reality of the torn tendon on the MRI report, I realized how I had delayed, rather than promoted, healing for the past three weeks with excessive movement. I feel so stupid. I need to baby this thing and walk carefully and minimally on it, especially if I want to enjoy walking around during our December trip to Ecuador and the Galapagos.

And my knee was doing so well before November! It managed the arduous 170-mile Grand to Grand Ultra in late September. It felt blissfully normal during our 20-mile Grand Canyon trek in late October. I wrote about how I’d use this season to fully recover and enjoy activities other than running.

But I got greedy and wanted more. I thought, why not tack a 100-miler on to the end of this year? This injury—this is why not.

It’s trying to heal, I can feel it getting better. I have resolved not to jeopardize that healing. I’m full of remorse, not only for the injury but for how I masked the underlying problem with two cortisone shots—one a year ago and one in July, which may have weakened the tendon—and for anti-inflammatories I took during the earlier miles of the November 2 event to dull the ache as my knee talked to me. And remorse for trying to fast-track the comeback during the past three weeks. Why must I fast-track everything?

I’m not feeling sorry for myself—I’m feeling pissed at myself.

I have a role model for this behavior—ultra legend Ann Trason (the 14-time Western States 100 champ). When I read the MRI report, my mind transported me back to a conversation with her decades ago.

Ann Trason, my first ultrarunning mentor

I was a rookie runner and a new mother, age 29, in the summer of 1998 when I interviewed Ann Trason for a local publication. I was wide-eyed about this thing called “ultrarunning” and star-struck by this woman who happened to be my neighbor—she lived one block over in our little town of Kensington, just north of North Berkeley—and she used to run by my house, so we started talking even though she’s famously shy. She was injured and coming off her peak of winning Western States and Comrades (the world’s oldest ultra, 54 miles in South Africa) back to back, just two weeks apart.

Sitting in her house, she blinked her watery eyes—she would not cry—and looked angry as she described her setback. As excerpted from my article (you can read a PDF of the full story here):

“She spent all of ’96 running in pain while her doctors tried to pin down the source. Exploratory surgery finally revealed that 90 percent of her hamstring had torn away from the bone. That spooked Trason, who was awake with a local anesthetic during the operation and watched as doctors reattached her hamstring with surgical bolts. ‘When I saw that,’ she says, ‘the thing that upset me the most was, I can’t believe I did this to my body. I said, this isn’t sane. … Running is about being smart and knowing your body, and if you’re so stupid that you go and tear your muscle off the bone—I looked at that as a failure.”

[emphasis added on the lines that express how I’m feeling now]

But, even though I revered Trason as my first role model in the sport a quarter-century ago, I do not aspire to be like her, in spite of her superhuman running.

She’s 64 now, and her story doesn’t have a happy ending. All reports I’ve heard about her indicate that pain and personal problems affected her overall health and behavior, and she became a recluse. (Her retreat from the public eye began after author Chris McDougall negatively portrayed her as la bruja—the witch—in his 2009 bestseller Born To Run, which understandably angered Ann because he didn’t interview her for the book.)

The last time I saw her, as she walked and I ran a timed-loop 24-hour event in San Francisco on New Year’s Eve of 2017, she acted downright mean toward me. Each time I passed her on the loop, she heckled me with screeching comments such as, “There goes Sarah the celebrity,” and sarcastically teased, "Oooh, look at her go.” Her demeanor was bizarre—and heartbreaking, since she used to give me hugs and encouragement at ultras where she worked as a race director or volunteer.

I’ve always wanted and preached longevity in this sport. I’ve always aimed to treat others with kindness. I need to take the long view with this injury and treat myself kindly also.

That means scratching plans for the March marathon and coming back carefully, with a focus on physical therapy to fix my “knee problem” (which really is a problem stemming from my pelvis and glutes). It also means letting my non-refundable ski season pass go unused. I don’t want to do anything, such as downhill skiing, to risk re-injury.

Thankfully, I can focus attention and love on our two horses, and riding them doesn’t affect my knee. They’re the easygoing, patient role models I need. They’re extra fat and hairy for winter. By summer, they’ll have sleek coats that show off their muscle tone.

I may feel thicker and less fit like my equine boys now, but come summer, I’ll be back for the long run.

Sweet Cobalt, with Maverick in the background, in scruffy winter …

… versus sleek, fit summer.

Grateful

In spite of this injury setback, and in spite of anxiety about the direction of our country and everything related to climate—drought, fire, and extreme weather—I feel so much gratitude and have reasons to be optimistic.

In the spirit of Thanksgiving, I’ll list some things for which I’m deeply grateful:

• I do not need surgery. My injury could be so much worse. And I met my year’s top goal (the Grand to Grand Ultra) before the tendon tear.

• My two kids (ages 26 and 23) are happy, healthy, and on good paths career-wise. I’ve always felt as a mother that I can’t feel OK unless my kids are OK.

• My husband makes me laugh at least once a day. On Saturday, while he kneaded a loaf of homemade sourdough, I grumped and nagged about how he spills flour on the counter and leaves dough clumps stuck to the cutting board. He calmly replied with genuine bemusement more than sarcasm, “I love it when I’m only halfway through something and you tell me I need to clean up.” He defused my grumpiness, and I thanked him for our weekly bread. He makes me a better person.

• An elk herd has returned to roam our land, and fresh snow is falling. Both those things are beautiful and abundant, calming deep fears that these natural wonders may one year disappear.

• Every time I walked around town and entered local businesses last week, I bumped into acquaintances and had fun or meaningful chats, creating a sense of belonging and community.

• A breast cancer scare from a mammogram in September turned out to be a complete false alarm, a silly mistake, but I won’t forget the fear, uncertainty, and clarity of priorities I felt in the days before a followup ultrasound showed it to be all OK—especially now, as a friend copes with breast cancer.

• I have two horses, two dogs, two cats, and eighteen chickens to fill my empty nest.

So grateful for all of this.

I could multiply this list with other things involving family, friends, and the world outside my window, but the items above sprang to mind first.

What about you? I’d love to read some of the things for which you’re grateful in the comments below.

What’s ahead for this newsletter

Given injury, holidays, and December travel to a place where WiFi and electricity will be spotty, I won’t have a lot of fresh content related to running over the next four to six weeks. I plan to repurpose some evergreen stories from my old blog and my Ultrarunning magazine column. I also will write about some non-running topics such as book and travel recommendations. I’ll endeavor to keep publishing every Wednesday but will skip Christmas day. I welcome your feedback and suggestions about what you’d like to read here in the coming year!

With gratitude,

Sarah

Road-tripping to California for Thanksgiving.

If you’d like to support this newsletter but prefer not to subscribe at the supporter level, I invite you to make a small donation to my virtual tip jar below.