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Flexibility

Flexibility

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I sat through a four-hour HR presentation yesterday about goal setting since we’re in the throes of the performance appraisal and review season at work.  It was basically the same thing I had heard last time I sat through the presentation, about two years ago, but the session reminded me how worthwhile it is to set goals in one’s personal or professional life.  Goals help us “reach” just beyond what we think we’re capable of; they provide focus to help make our day-to-day actions more worthwhile and meaningful; and sometimes, at least in my experience, they’re just fun to try to achieve, no matter how challenging (or impossible) we might think that they are.

Goals and running obviously go hand-in-hand, regardless if you’re a novice or a pro.  For many people, simply learning how to run is a goal in and of itself, while others might go for a certain time or mileage goal.  My big pregnancy/running goal was to do the March Madness half marathon on Sunday, but a couple weeks ago, when I decided that I no longer felt comfortable with the idea of doing a challenging half, one that’d put me a considerable distance away from my midwives and my hospital, I decided that my new goal would be to complete a neighborhood 8k that was just a mile (or so) away from my home.  As my experience shows, sometimes goals necessitate flexibility.  If you’re itching to run a 3:33 marathon but get a really nasty case of shin splints two weeks before the race, maybe that 3:33 goal will change to a 3:43 or hell, just to be able to finish the race.  It happens.  You just have to go with it.

All last week, I felt super confident in my ability to run this neighborhood 8k on Sunday.  Without even meaning to, I had managed to run six consecutive days in a row–not at high mileage, mind you–and I felt great.

Really.

Even pre-pregnant, I wouldn’t run six consecutive days, so I’m not quite sure how it happened, but it did.  Anyway, come Thursday of last week, I set out on a lunchtime run and about a mile in, had searing pain in my lower right back, right above the back of my pelvis, pretty close to my SI joint.  After the pain damn near debilitated me, I decided to do what I rarely do–stop running–and instead walked 1.5 miles back to the office, hoping that walking would re-set or re-align whatever I had managed to screw up.

Earlier in the week, I started to wear a maternity belt, purely for preventive purposes, thinking that I’d try to make myself as comfortable as possible for these final 5-6 weeks.  I wasn’t uncomfortable in the first place, but I envisioned that as the little one continued to grow, he/she would increasingly put more and more pressure on my bladder and lower back, and I thought I’d try to circumvent the issue before it even began.  In retrospect, and from talking to my midwives and to a massage therapist and my previously-pregnant and nurse practitioner sister, I’m pretty sure that that stupid belt managed to redistribute my weight in such a way that it put a crazy amount of pressure (or weight?) on my lower right-hand side of my back, where it wasn’t previously, and that made everything go out-of-whack.  Awesome.

Just as I had to be flexible and forgiving for not running my half marathon, over the course of the end of last week, I soon realized that my 8k aspirations might also be coming to a halt, since it hurt like hell to walk (or lie down, for the matter), and running was out of the question.  A 60-minute massage (at my midwives’ recommendation) on Saturday evening seemed to alleviate some of the pain, but it was still present, so my Sunday morning race came and went without my participation.

What a drag.

The good news is that with every passing day, the pain lessens.  The bad news is that it remains to be seen if I’ll have this pain for the remainder of the pregnancy–which wouldn’t be all that uncommon, since most prego ladies get some sort of back pain or another.  I’m soooooo hoping for the former, for obvious reasons.  Back pain is tough to deal with because we implicate our backs in every single thing that we do.  Back muscles aren’t like, say, your anterior deltoid, a muscle that you could probably avoid using if you really tried.  Just try not using your back.  It’s pretty impossible.

I’ve decided that I’m “done” being negative about my pain and am hoping that my optimism will carry me through this little blip in my pregnancy 🙂  I am still signed-up for the Shamrock Shuffle 8k on 4/10, when I will be seriously pregnant (36 weeks!), and I really hope to run it, depending on how my back and the rest of my prego body feels.

Hence, flexibility.

I’m super happy to be able to say that I’ve been able to run through at least 35 weeks of my pregnancy, and I really want to be able to continue to run up until the day the little one comes.  Whether that happens, however, is somewhat out of my control at this point.

I suppose I’ll just need to remember all that stuff about goal-setting and tell myself that I’ve got to be flexible 🙂

Moving right along

Moving right along

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Another midwife visit this week  (at roughly 32 weeks, 4 days), and everything’s looking great… which is fantastic, to say the least.  Interestingly, she said that many of the practice’s patients who are runners either begin to really slow down their running at this point in their pregnancy or stop altogether and move to the elliptical.  If given the choice, obviously I’d opt for the former rather than the latter.  I have no shame in plodding along if need be!

Her bringing up that point prompted me to ask what she thought of my potentially running the MM half marathon in two weeks.  And long story short, in part due to what she said, and largely in part to my own fears of being really far away from the city, my hospital, and my midwives in the off-chance that something bad happens, I’ve decided to forgo the race.  Yeah, I’m not doing it.

At any other time, right about now I’d write something like “yeah, bummer that I can’t do it…” and lament the day away, but I’m actually pleased with my choice.  I feel like I’m doing the responsible adult thing.  🙂  Honestly, I have no doubt that I’m physically still able to run a half marathon–although slowly–at this point in my pregnancy, but I feel like I need to be cautious and err on the side of safety.  After all, if I hurt myself in some way, I won’t be hurting just me… little Yoda would inevitably feel some of it as well.  And God forbid I go into pre-term labor or something awful like that when I’m over an hour away from Northwestern.  There will always be other MM half-marathons each spring, and certainly there will always be other races, too.  In fact, there’s a 5k/8k race in Chicago that very same morning, at Diversey Harbor, that I’m eying.  Not only is the distance more manageable for a 35-week-pregnant lady, but it’s also in the city, and it’s just a stone’s-throw away from Northwestern (again, just playing it safe here).  I’ll *probably* sign-up for it and do it for kicks.

The silver lining to my not running the MM race is that someone else will be able to… at least, as much as I can tell.  The MM race is incredibly popular because of the time of year (not much competition for other distances race in Chicagoland in March), it falls in line with Boston training pretty well, it’s inexpensive, and it’s on a tough, hilly course, and all these factors combined this year to make the event sell-out in fewer than two hours.  Two hours!  Granted, part of that is because the race can only take 1,000 entrants, but still!  Two freakin’ hours!  Once I decided that I wasn’t going to do the run any longer, I emailed the race director that night, explained my situation, and asked that he extend my spot to someone he knew who really wanted to run but didn’t register in time or, better yet, post my spot on Ebay and auction it off as part of their scholarship fundraising drive, since the race’s proceeds supports a scholarship in the first place.  Everything I’ve ever read suggests that entries are non-transferable, so I thought it was a long shot that he’d hear me out.  However, based on our email exchange, I think they’ll be able to allow another runner to fill my spot.

Talk about a pleasant surprise!

I’m glad I did my due diligence here because otherwise, I’d feel kinda guilty for flaking out on a race that many people want to run but can’t.   I guess it just goes to show you that there’s no harm done in asking for things for which you think you’ll be rejected.  🙂