It’s taken me a while to write this, stared at the screen
for far too long, started over a half dozen times- this is not how I imagined
my cross country racing coming to an end.
I raced only 3 races this season, which is less than normal,
but in my opinion there is far too much racing in the university cross country
season. I skipped the first race to do Barrelman instead (a very good
decision). My legs were quite sore after
this race, but nothing alarming.
The
following week we were off to Queen’s to race at Fort Henry. This was to be the
course for OUAs so there was a good turnout of schools, although Guelph and
Western were noticeably missing, as were others. (for those that don’t know,
Guelph is rather dominant on the university cross country scene, to put it
lightly). We had fantastic weather (no sarcasm) for this race and it is a
course that really suits me as the ground is fairly hard-packed (basically a grass-covered
rock), without any steep hills. I had a pretty good race coming in 6th
overall in a time of 21:52 (6km- 3:38/km). Since I was still under the weather
from a cold I'd had all week I was really happy with the result and was ready to come back in
two weeks even better. But that didn’t
happen.
Things went downhill pretty quickly after the race as my leg
was causing me a lot of pain. I went to the university athletics therapy where
they informed me I had several knots in the muscles in my right leg. By the end
of the week I was skeptical about the diagnosis and had a bone scan arranged for
a few days before OUAs. I ran only twice between the Queen’s race and OUAs two
weeks later, but wasn’t too worried about fitness as a 22 minute race is really
not that long. Easy to tough it out, right? I was not contacted with the bone
scan results before OUAs so I just assumed that there was no problem.
OUAs is the Ontario Championships for cross country- the end
of the season for many as not all schools will pay for their teams to go to the
Canadian Championships (which can be located anywhere in Canada- this year they
are in Newfoundland, the past four years they have been in Quebec/Ontario). The
race started out at a brisk pace, with me going through the first kilometer in
about 3:18, which is faster than I would have liked but was not so fast that it
would screw me over for the next 5km. I slowly worked my way up the field over
the first 3km, but the pain was setting in fast and I was struggling to hold
on. The last two kilometers were complete agony, to put it nicely, but being
competitive I kept pushing. My quads and calves had seized up by the 5km mark
and I would estimate that my last kilometer took about 4 minutes (i should have been running about 3:35/km for the first few kilometers); I went from
12th to 18th pretty quickly but there was literally
nothing I could do. I was informed after by my friend’s parents that my face
was as white as a ghost and they didn’t think I was going to make it to the
finish line- I would say that accurately describes how I felt. (Finish time was
22 minutes on the dot, 3:40/km). I did not take one step past the finish line
but opted to crawl under the finish chute rope and lie in the grass for the
next 25 minutes. I don’t think I have ever hurt so much in a race before, so
looking for the positives, I have learned that I can push through a lot of pain
and still make it to the finish line. I think the positives may end there
though.
The bone scan results came back a couple days later, and
yes, you guessed it, I have another stress fracture. I have no idea how, given
my very limited run volume, so if you have the magic answer, let me know. So no more running for me this year, and no
more cross country, ever. The bright side is that my team gets to go to the
Canadian Championships because we did well enough as a team (although the
school doesn’t think I deserve to go since I won’t be able to run, despite the
fact that I was our top runner and team captain; ending rant now, but so much
more to it than that), and my swimming has improved remarkably already from not
running for a week.
So that is the update for the time being- I will be taking
the break from running as an opportunity to really work on my swim to hopefully
see some improvement there. I know I said I’d have a season review part 2 post
but that is going to have to wait a little longer as I am waiting to hear about
what the Rev3/Challenge merger is doing with their races, as well as if the
recent partnership between Ironman and LifeTimeTri is changing anything with
those races.
As always thanks for reading! I will try to
think of some things to write about over the winter so I don’t appear to drop
off the face of the earth.
