This is partly recycled from a few years ago when I chronicled my earlier running path over the decades and phases of my life. However, I am revisiting the story because it has now been 20 years since I found my way back to running and racing following several years of injury and unfortunate events.
Y2K The Crumbling
First, I guess you have go back 25 years. After four years of steady decline, I enjoyed a nice resurgence at age 40. I built a base and stayed healthy and managed to achieve my primary goal that year of breaking 4:40 in the mile, and beating the local favorite in the Amherst, MA Masters Mile that summer. And for the next two years things went pretty well, I ran a marathon, won my age at Bolder Boulder in 2000, ran dozens of races, and stayed healthy. Until I didn’t.
By late spring of 2000 I was nearing the end of the second year of a post doctoral research fellowship with the USDA in my hometown of Fort Collins, CO. Everything seemed to be going great. The research was interesting and rewarding, and I was actually getting paid a decent wage for the first time in my career. We had one kid getting ready for kindergarten, and another precociously about to start pre-school before turning 3.
I was just wrapping up a spring of racing highlighted with a 27:13 8K at the Drake Relays road race and winning my age a month later at the huge Bolder Boulder on perhaps the hottest day ever for the race.
I was enjoying my post doc, doing research on bird repellents and bird behavior. I had a couple of publications and was just setting up for a new three-dimensional phase of the research in the lab. However, I found that there would be a gap in funding and no guarantee that that the project would even continue. With a family to support I had to take an offer with a nearby private company specializing wildlife toxicology and disease.
There were parallels, and the CEO, Dick, promised that I would be able to continue with the repellent research. So, with some trepidation, I took what was seemed to be effectively a lateral transfer into the private sector.
I hated it immediately.
Looking back I could have gone back to the USDA to finish the final three months and to apply for the extension to the fellowship. I definitely should have but I decided to make the best of the new situation, with the hope it would get better. I was a Ph.D. with years of experience, but they immediately put me under the wing of 25 year old woman with a B.S. degree and a bad attitude toward men. She did get canned after a number of months, but even then things hardly improved. Within two weeks the CEO told me to stop thinking about doing any of my previous research, that my time was all his now. And so it went for 15 months.
After some 12 years of being fairly independent at work, doing my job without someone breathing down my neck, I had lost control of my destiny as a scientist, and I had to do what they said and they way they said to do it. My stress levels were off the charts, and within a month of starting my new job I was a basket case.
I continued to run but by the end of summer my knees were bothering me on every outing and I was not doing quality workouts. Maybe 30 miles a week, mostly just running. I jumped into a couple track races and and 5Ks over the summer, and in the fall I did run two cross country races. However, my body was rebelling due to stress, poor sleep, and general unhappiness with what my career had turned into. The running suffered, my mile time that August was 6 seconds slower than the previous year, and by fall I was running 5K a good 30 seconds compared to what I had done in early summer, before making the switch.
In spite of the decline in performance, running was a good stress release and I frequently took my lunch hour (timed to the minute) by going out for a 4-6 mile run on dirt roads near the lab. Although that was a relief, my knees hurt on every run.
2001 was no better, and actually worse on my knees. I stepped back even more on training over the winter and focused on work and family. I’d get out a few times a week and got in some cross country skiing on weekends. I had gained about 10 pounds over the previous year, and ran Bolder Boulder off of 20 miles a week, running two and a half minutes slower than the exceedingly hot day of 2000 (fitness-wise close to a 3 minute drop). Over the summer I did improve somewhat, but could only muster a 37:40 at the Colorado Run (more than two minutes slower than I had done a couple years earlier).
Within months of starting that job I started making applications for other jobs. In the end I had helped bring in over $200K in grant money to the lab, and the agreement had been to raise about half of that in a year. At the time I did not know that the grant money had already been awarded to the lab, but after 15 months of unhappy tenure there, Dick the CEO brought me into his office and laid me off, saying that I had not done enough for the grant writing, saying with a straight face, “We have hit an economic downturn, due to 9/11,” (this was just two weeks later) and he added. “You just didn’t get the job done.”
Actually Dick, I did get the job done. You were just a greedy and deceitful psychopath.
Although it was a huge relief to be away from that company and its toxic atmosphere (he had fired about a third of the professional employees in my time there) there was some damage. Two weeks later, while I was still waiting for the first unemployment checks to keep our family afloat, a former coworker drove up to a local race with a new car. Another part of the deal when I first signed on was that I was to get 7% of the grants as a bonus. The coworkers got the bonus, I didn’t.
Fortunately, I landed a new job at Colorado State University within a couple of months and we did not have to move.
2002-2003 Knees Are Shot
In 2001 I hit a career rock bottom. For the better part of 20 years I had worked to be a research biologist, working as a technician, getting a masters, working in the field and as a research associate at a major university, years getting a doctorate, and scrambling as a post doc. I felt I had been on the cusp for several years, but the other side of that was an abyss.
I took the first job that was offered, it was a down grade really, as an environmental policy/writer position. But it would pay the bills and ultimately lead to a more stable, (usually) less stressful lifestyle. No more paper chase, get grants, and publish or start over. I still have some regrets about making this shift in mid-40s, and do miss the excitement of doing research (sometimes it was drudgery, particularly the publish part).
Nevertheless, at the end of 2001 I embarked on a new career path, but I soon moved up, getting a team lead position after just a few months on the job. However, my running had yet to hit the bottom.
Sometime around the end of the year, I was on an easy but snowy 45 or 50 minute run along the foothills and I twisted my foot on a slippery rock. I heard something go pop but it not hurt that much until I got home. That injury to my posterior tibialis only compounded the knee problems. While recovering from the twisted foot I spent some time in the gym and did some leg weights, thinking that would build up my quads and ease the knee pain.
After a couple weeks, and cross country skiing while on my first work trip to Alaska, I resumed some easy running. Maybe 10 days later on a blustery January day I decided to hit the track and a set of 200s at a moderate effort, maybe starting at around 40 seconds and bring it down to 36 or so. Not that hard, starting at about 3K race effort and finishing at mile/1500 pace. On last repetition two, in the set of eight, my knees tightened up and got sore.
That little session pretty much ended running for nearly a year and a half. Actually, it wasn’t just that session. The prior year and a half of personal stress, unaddressed knee problems, and the tendon tear to set it up.
I rested and waited for three weeks with not much improvement, so I went to the orthopedist, who was getting up in years but had been world renowned in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. His first response was that maybe I should give up running and take up kayaking–which was sort of funny, he had said much the same in 1984 when I visited the same clinic for a lingering hip/piriformis issue.
His advice was to take NSAIDS for a few weeks, ice it every day, and come back in four to six weeks if it doesn’t get better. I followed two out of three but forgot to schedule another appointment. So I just spent half a year before going back in. I just stopped running, and did little bit of light skiing, and some cycling or swimming. Passively biding my time with the hope that things would improve. I would try to run a little bit, but not regularly, maybe 20-30 minutes here and there, and my foot and knees did not improve much.
When I finally did go back, the doctor was incredulous that I hadn’t been in sooner. He prescribed some anti-inflammatory medications and up to 12 weeks of PT, which I did in two bouts a couple months apart.
The PT helped some, but only marginally. By the end of 2002 I had run maybe 200 miles, the lowest since high school, and gained the 10 pounds I had lost in the summer of 2001.
After a year of not being able to run I still followed the sport, but now as a fan. I missed it and there was no end in sight.
Much of 2003 was a blur with work and family life. Every two months I would have a one or two week trip to Alaska, and the land was growing on me. My co-worker (and tormentor) Pat had grown up in Anchorage and thought his hometown was great, the cosmopolitan epitome of the state. The Interior and Fairbanks, where I was spending half my time, were the desolate pits. But I found the openness and big sky of Fairbanks to be somewhat appealing.
In 2002 and 2003 I got most of my exercise by bike commuting. It was 6 miles to the campus and our office. It would take 18-20 minutes to get there, mostly by bike path, in the morning. With a 200 foot elevation gain back home, my ride on the return was more like 25 or 30 minutes. I rode in 3-4 days a week, as long as the weather was good. On weekends I rode on the back roads and trails in the foothills for an hour or two. The running was not coming around but cycling actually felt pretty good.
Over a couple weekends in the spring of 2003 I did some long hill climbs with a runner friend who also did some cycling. I left him in the dust on the climbs and he encouraged me to give cycling a try. I was not planning on hard core mountain biking or road cycling, but checked the race schedule and found some summer hill climbs at the ski areas, 5K to 8K and climbing 800 to 1000 meters. My debut would be in mid-June at Winter Park.
At about that time I had two friends, from out of town and completely separately ask the same question almost word for word.
“So it looks like you’re done for good with running?”
I was disappointed to hear them ask that but seeing how I had hardly been able run for 17 months, I can see why.
My friend Tim, the second person to ask, had just traveled from Oregon run Bolder Boulder as a destination/bucket list race. Coming from sea level he thought the event was incredibly difficult, if not horrific. I had a couple beers with him and his wife as we swapped stories. The next day, slightly hung over from the two pints (they were strong pints I might add). I went out for a ride to Horsetooth Mountain, it was a 2000 foot ascent from our place, with the last 3 miles climbing some 1500 feet on a steep trail.
Near the top, at about 7000 feet of elevation, there was a particularly steep pitch on the rocky trail. I stalled and couldn’t get my foot out of the clip fast enough and fell over, cracking my wrist. I was in a cast for 6 weeks, thus ending a mountain biking hill climbing career that never began.
Now what?
I said the heck with that, and started running again. Just easy miles at first but jumped into the Father’s Day 5K in Fort Collins. My kids ran the 0.5K fun run and had a blast. With my blue cast I ran a 19 minute and finished with a smile.
The road back was not smooth. I ran about 20 miles a week, and some days my knees were okay, but then they’d ache for a few days and I would have to rest or cross train. I did a couple 5Ks that summer, running an 18:26 at sea level in Anchorage, now 2 minutes slower than I had done three years prior and an 18:30 back in Denver, a slight improvement if you account for the mile-high elevation. After three or four months of running, I wasn’t back but feeling better.
At work things were heating up as we were preparing our revisions for an environmental impact statement. We had a big week-long meeting in Fort Collins with government agencies, and that was the most stressful week since I had started. I got home that weekend and had a sore throat, and my defective-pock-marked tonsils were swelling. So I went to the doctor, thinking it was strep throat. I tested negative and the doctor sent me home. Overnight my tonsil grew to the size of a ping-pong ball, nearly closing my throat. I had to go to the ER and have the abscess drained, with no anesthesia. That was the most painful minute in my life!
I had to stop running, and had my tonsils removed two weeks later. In early November. Having your tonsils taken out at age 45 is rough. I had to isolate at home for 15 days. I couldn’t eat any solid food and could barely sip a warm or cold drink, jello and ice cream were the only caloric foods I could take in.
Fortunately, the work schedule was not too hectic after my extended break. I was able to start running about a week before Christmas. I had lost about 10 or 12 pounds following the surgery, and an added bonus was that I felt without the tonsils partially obstructing my throat I could take more air with each inhale. On New Years Day I ran a local 5K in just under 19 minutes. I had no base but felt pretty good. I did not know it but that was the beginning of my comeback.
Looking back it’s interesting that it took a fall off my bike and a middle-aged tonsillectomy to get back on track for running.
rrunnin234 