A note to KZ

KZ

You were pretty upset with how your cross season ended today.

Your hip started to yell on Tuesday, and while we hoped it would subside by the meet, it didn’t.  You knew this before you started the race today – feeling it in your early warm up, but after we chatted, you elected to start because you didn’t want to leave the day to question.  You identified this was not a decision you were happy about.  You knew if you started and the hip was not cooperating, you’d have to face dropping out of the race or performing poorly and maybe even injuring yourself more.

I could see at the mile the “hitch” in your stride.  A half of a mile later it was significantly more pronounced and by nearly two miles you were barely running forward, but putting more effort and energy in going side to side.

You caught my eye and tearfully stopped.  You were upset, angry, hurt, and frustrated.  I will admit, I was a bit emotional myself for a moment there – seeing you that upset, it upset me.  Thinking of it now still does.  But, I also realized that I needed to be there for you there and if we were both bawling on the side of the course it would not be helpful for either of us. 

You said a lot of things there, but candidly, you were not ready for any responses or answers.  That is okay.  But you asked me to respond to it.  Now that you are a little distance from it, I actually think you won’t want to talk about it.   But when you are, here are some thoughts I have on some of those topics.

You were upset that you were barely even sweating or breathing hard.  Yes, that happens when you have a good engine in a car and a flat tire.  The car just won’t go, or go very well.   If anything this shows the increases you have gained in your fitness.  And indeed, you were hampered by the bad hip.

You wanted to know why this injury had to happen right now.  “Why couldn’t this happen next week?”  I don’t really know the answer to that one.  Injuries happen.  Of course they are not just mystical events – they happen for some reason.  It takes some thought to work through that.  It could be a muscular imbalance (maybe one leg is longer than another) or a weakness … combined with some pushing on a day to achieve some performance along with all the other combined stresses you have been putting on your body. 

How do you avoid that?  You give that the thought to begin to unravel what may have caused it.  You look to address it.  It could be knowing when you feel particular twinge that you need to back off.  It might be working that muscular weakness with exercises to strengthen that so it is less likely to happen.  It could actually be running more in terms of time so that your body grows more impervious to injuries like this.

Of course, now you have to let it heal.  Jumping back on it because you think you are “losing fitness” (as you said) is not a good idea.  It is an idea that has been thought by many before you, including by this guy.  When it is an injury like this, all you end up really doing in that case is delaying recovery, and taking more time to get back,  IN other words, by trying to get back at it because you think you are losing fitness, you lose more because you end up spending more time recovering.

You didn’t want to see your team mates because you thought they’d consider you a quitter.  I honestly don’t think your team mates would think that because runners of all folks get this.  But let’s say that indeed they thought you were a quitter.  My response to that is, that thought doesn’t matter.  Okay, I actually have some harsher language than that but that is how I will say it here. 

The people who love you, care about you, know you or have some basic intelligence about you or running would not call you a quitter.   If you were a quitter, you would have dropped out of this sport a long time ago.  It is easy to continue with something when you have a bit of success with it or if it comes easy.  Running for you has not been that.  Arguably, you have not always taken the path to make it easy (like deciding to start running the day the actual XC season started versus starting with the summer program before your freshman year, and then deciding to skip the summer program in your sophomore year because you thought you were not fit enough to do it).  But you have not quit – you have kept coming back. 

I can’t say that I would have been strong enough to do that when I was your age.  I was pretty bad a lot of sports, and once I could find an easy way to slip out of them, I did.  With running, I did find a degree of success, and so it was easy for me to stick with that. 

So, one race where you are hurt and step off to avoid further injury – no, that is not quitting.  That is a smart thing so that you can live to fight another day.

You did make the note that I have made choices to not quit when I was risking injury, and specifically called out the Boulder 100.  You are absolutely correct.  I did know that I was doing things to my body that were destructive that day.  But as I was not sure if I would ever do that distance again – I’d decided to press on and get it done.  In its own way, it was sort of assuring that I would have the option to never have to go to the 100 again.  Had I stepped off at 70 miles, I would be compelled to do the 100 only for the sole reason to address that failure.  As that thought was more horrible to me than bearing with it for another 30 miles, I stuck with it.   That is the ridiculous logic of an ultra runner.  I really don’t recommend ultras to people I care about because of these sort of thoughts we kick about.  If you want to do one some day I will try to talk you out of it.  If I can’t I will be glad to help you with it as much as I can and you will let me. 

Anyway, I got off track there for a bit.  So, no, you are not a quitter. 

You thought your coach would be mad at you.  I can tell you he most certainly was not.  Greg, Kay, Dan, and Hazard all want to see you do well.  When they see you not do well, and get frustrated with it – they reflect that back.  Your success, not just in times and PRs, but in how you grow as a person and a runner, is their success.  When they see you hit a pitfall like this, they know you will work through it, but they go for that ride with you.  They are runners too, and so they know how you feel.

In retrospect, while it was the last thing you wanted to have happen at that moment, your coach, team mates, mother and grandfather find you at the same time was sort of funny.  I know you wanted to just disappear, but they wanted to comfort you – because they care about you.

As a side note, and something that took me a bit to realize:  most folks you deal with are less interested in how you perform in your running, and are much more interested in how you feel about your performance.  You can tell most people that you ran such and such time at such and such race and unless they know that stuff well, they are going to follow up and ask something like, “were you happy with your race?”  Because if you are happy with your race, then they will be.  If you are unhappy with your race, then they won’t be unhappy, but they will probably be unhappy for you.  Keep this in mind because while we all pursue running for our own reasons, and it can have deep personal meaning to us – it is just running.  It is not who we are exclusively or define what kind of person we are or the nature of those relationships.  Running won’t be there at some point – those other things will be.

But today, it was important to you.  And it is still probably important to you.  I get that.  I love that you are thinking about it that way.  I love that you talk about goals related to it because I see you exploring your limits, commitment, team, understanding the bigger picture of your physical self as a system, and considering the benefits of long term goals and driving to that.  These lessons are applicable in many places.

So, if when you wake up in a day or a week or a month, and it is still important to you – remember those feeling you had.  If helps, write them down.  Call on that for inspiration as to what you want to do, why you want to do it, and then how you are going to get there.  I would suggest had you run a PR today, you’d be happy, but you would not have this learning opportunity that you now have.  Failures like this are always better learning opportunities than successes.  They don’t taste good when you get them, but when you resolve them, it is pretty sweet.  Ask me about Matt Carpenter sometime and I can give you at least three epic examples.

And of course, I love you, and I am proud of you.  Keep at it kid – you are great.  Go out hard, pick it up, finish strong and make your teeth sweat.

Dad