This year marks my 3rd year of being a ‘runner’ (by my own definition) and last week I experienced a new 1st. Not a great 1st like my first 1/2 marathon, or my 1st Disney run, this one was really hard for me. My first DNS (Did Not Start.)
This was intensely more difficult than I could have possibly imagined. You see it wasn’t that I couldn’t run because of a physical injury, I think that would have been easier for me to deal with. If you physically can’t run, then you can’t run (lol duh.) However I couldn’t run because of the unknown, the unknown of what possible harm it was doing to me or the baby. You see the last 2 times I had run prior to this I had some spotting (light bleeding) the day after. We don’t know exactly what is causing this and because of this we didn’t want to take the risk that it would harm either of us. (GREAT NEWS just yesterday I got the ok to run again more next week!)
I know this seems fairly straight forward and obviously and really it is, I would never do anything I thought would hurt our baby. The problem is running IS my stress reliever, it IS the way I process things. I literally pound it out when my feet hit the pavement. I pray, I worship I work things out. I breath in fresh air (or as fresh as you can find in the suburbs) and breath out my stress. I have had a few major stresses in the last 2 weeks and I haven’t truly been able to work through any of them. I know there are plenty of other options out there, and if it turns out I can’t run I will find something else, but its not the same.
All of that being said, I have a friend who signed up to run the entire series with me this year, and she was still running it. I wanted to be there and support her, to cheer her on. Sarah did great, It was honestly hard to watch her cross the start line, I won’t lie I cried. Then I walked around to the finish and during that time I ran into a young man watching his girlfriend run. He had watched her run several times and listing to him talk about supporting and cheering her on over the last year reminded me of the other reasons I love this sport.
