Monday morning did not go according to anyone’s plan in our house. In the pre-dawn hours, my wife was feeling an incredible amount of pain in her lower back. The pain was bad enough that she got out of bed and started vomiting. We spent some time trying to assess whether things were getting worse, or whether we could control any of her syptoms, but we eventually decided that we needed to get her to the emergency room.
We spent several hours in the emergency room at UCSF, where she was triaged and seen briefly by the resident and attending physicians. She was never given a bed because there were no beds available. Instead, we were called back from the waiting room several times for her to receive exams, blood tests, and an ultrasound. The doctors concluded that she had a large kidney stone. Her symptoms subsided, thankfully. Since she was no longer doubled over and vomiting in the ER, the doctors didn’t prescribe anything beyond tylenol for her pain. We went home midday with instructions to come back if things got worse. Unfortunately, they did.
Tuesday morning, the same thing happened. This time, we headed straight to the ER. My wife was still vomiting from the pain when she was triaged. The ER at UCSF was slightly less crowded than the day before, so she was put in a bed in a hallway and hooked up to an IV with some pain medication. The medication worked wonders as we waited for a CT scan of her kidneys. The CT scan showed that the stone was 7 mm in diameter. She was scheduled for a same-day operation to place a stent between her kidney and bladder, so that her kidney could drain and relieve her symptoms for the next few weeks as the stone (hopefully) worked its way out of her body.
All this happened, and my wife was never assigned a room in the hospital. After she was in the operating room for about 2 hours, I got a phone call from the UCSF PACU. Everything had gone well, and she’d be ready to go in a few minutes. I pulled the car around the front of the hospital as she was wheeled out in a wheelchair, and we went home for the night. I went back out to fetch her prescriptions right before the pharmacy closed.
Wednesday morning, I was physically and emotionally drained. I realized that things could’ve been a lot worse, but I had still experienced levels of stress and interruptions to my normal schedule that were completely unexpected. A few years ago, I would’ve forced myself back into a 5:30 AM wakeup and a sunrise training run. My past few years of training and injury, however, caused me to take a different approach.
I ended up running shorter runs on Thursday through Saturday, because that’s what felt easy and right. I covered about two thirds of the volume that I had run the week prior. I didn’t do any speed workouts. I worked during the daytime. I shopped for groceries and prepared food that my wife could eat. I took our energetic dog out for walks and playtime. I slept. The average time that I spent in bed was nearly 9.5 hours for the next 5 nights after the hospital visits. Stress is exhausting.
I mention all this to reflect on the reality that as distance runners, we can’t always meet the demands of our training programs. We must adjust to the circumstances of each day. When life stressors force an immediate change in priorities, our best option is often to abandon our obligations to our training plans. It took me years to believe this.
The act of running for several hours in a week induces an incredible amount of stress on our bodies. Sometimes, we encounter even more stress from external forces that are completely outside of our control. Too much stress causes things to break. It is so incredibly important for us to be able to recognize these situations of excess stress, and to react by providing the excess recovery that our bodies need. Practically, this means running easier, or shorter, or not at all, in order to avoid adding additional stress on ourselves during hard times. The prioritization of sleep, healthy eating, and healthy relationships over our training commitments will pay dividends down the road.
Taking a few days off from training, or even a full week, isn’t going to make or break a race performance. It’s important to stay on track with structured training and recovery when we can, but it’s equally as important to avoid feelings of guilt when the plan gets disrupted by forces outside of our control.
The thing that will break a race performance is a major injury. Injuries arise for many reasons, one of which is excess stress on the body. The body’s reactions to stress from non-running sources most certainly have an impact on the ability to recover from running-related stressors. After facing too many injuries in the past few years, and being forced to take months at a time away from running, I’ve learned my lesson here: when life is hard, don’t let a training plan be one of the things making it harder.
Looking back on the week, things could have been better, but they also could have been a lot worse. I can’t imagine the pain that my wife would be in for weeks if she hadn’t been able to get into the operating room to get the stent placed. I’m so glad that she’s feeling a lot better. We both feel like we made the right decisions. It’s also a nice feeling to know that I was there for her when she needed my help.
Adapting the training plan is a skill that I’ve only recently started applying in the past year or so. Many distance runners are high-achieving, ambitious people. I’m a member of that camp. I don’t like missing goals, but I know that cutting out a run from my schedule here and there is much more palatable than missing a race because of injury. I’ve been on both sides of the fence here, and now I know to stay on the safe side.