Bad to the Bone - George Thorogood & the Destroyers

I haven't run one step since the race. Not one. I did make it to Dr. Sanders who assured me I have been toiling in the absolutely WRONG shoes and that I have heel spurs. What a trip. It seems the body grows bone at the bottom of the heel to compensate for a strange gait? Maybe I'm misunderstanding. There was so much information, I frankly don't exactly know what happened. What I do know is that I exited the good doctor's office with a new sexy night splint and a compression brace to wear all the time. The brace thing is like one of those apricot colored sleeves for varicose veins that you see folks wearing, peeking out of skirts swishing next to shiny walkers, or winking out from the top of a sock garter. I wore it to work all week under my socks, my toes peeking out at the end like a leg warmer, but uglier. But it's the splint that is the real show-stopper, a genuine article of flirtation. Here's a photo, although mine does not sport the ethnic print on the bands, just a nice tasteful blue solid, for which I am grateful. Even the soft voice contained in my skull will catch a reflection and snicker. Ginger found me in it on the couch last night, happily reading, and could not contain herself.  She burst out laughing. In her defense, she recovered quickly from laughter to a generous type of pity, the kind where your beloved is cute while enduring humiliation, a cute just around the back entrance to monstrous. It's understandable. Look at this thing:

These items are not doing a great deal for my self esteem, so hopefully, they will do wonders for my health.


Soon I will suit up in the sausage outfit and the tight apricot ankle brace and hit the road. I have to tell you, the journey from last Sunday to today has been quite a ride. My pride has melted into a puddle of doubt, the pain of the last mile flickering across the movie screen of my brain late at night before I fall asleep. I wake up in the morning haunted and wondering how I will ever do it, build the bricks of mileage from 13.1 to 26.2. The enormity of it blinks a bright red, an impossibility in my mind, just as the 13.1 used to blink. I imagine if the one feat was possible, so is this one. But the task is daunting, a time-suck so expansive I suspect it will act as an excuse to avoid the novel. I am not quite sure I'm up to it, staggering the last four miles I imagine, down the stretch of the San Francisco Bay, half crazy with exhaustion and resentment. 


A few things rally me into the spandex: my parents are flying out from Albany, NY to cheer me on. My cousin will also be on hand, and perhaps my brother. I will be raising money for RADAR, finally doing a small thing to repay the kindness that has always been the pillow I can rest my writer's head on. And finally, I will only have to do it this once, set the goal and finish a thing, an impossible thing like a hydra, wild and deadly and gorgeous. And I know, that if I can do this, I can do anything. Also, I bet Ginger will buy me dinner. 


Love, 
Sara Elise