"When you get the blanket thing you can relax because everything you could ever want or be you already have and are. Now isn't that cool?"

-Bernard Jaffe, I Heart Huckabees

"Live today. Not yesterday. Not Tomorrow. Just today. Inhabit your moments. Don't rent them out to tomorrow."

-Jerry Spinelli, author

Maybe It's Gangrene? Hello?

Another trait of my delightfully obsessive personality is that I not only tend to (let's call it "focus") on the good things-- bicycles, barefoot running, proper nutrition, positive self talk, puppies, etc-- but when something goes wrong I also tend to "focus" on the bad things.

Case in point: last Friday I ran very sloppily for 7 miles and came out of it with some foot/ankle pain. No biggie! It happens! I popped two ibuprofens and expected a full recovery by morning.

When I put my foot on the ground the next morning and fell over from pain I knew there was a problem. A very big problem. If my foot was hurt it would not only affect my running, but my biking, my commuting, my time with the dog... the very essence of ME.

So I did what any self-respecting person would do in such a situation: I ate a whole thing of girlscout cookies and called my mom crying.

I told her how heart breaking it would be missing the half marathon and not be able to commute and gaining all sorts of weight from returning to a completely inactive lifestyle and how much it would hurt if they had to amputate and how I looked up all sorts of foot ailments on webmd and it took me to other links and it's pretty clear I have diabetes or typhoid fever and when I googled "healing time for metatarsal stress fracture" some guy's website with clouds as the background said "healing time for metatarsal stress fractures could be up to 7.5 weeks!"... never mind that I don't technically know that I have a metatarsal stress fracture, this shit is REAL.

...yeah...

I'm sort of like a woodpecker that gets off track but just continues to pound away at sheet metal.

My saving grace has been (I kid you not) Lindsey Vonn and the Olympics. On one of the last days of programming they ran a segment on spectacular crashes. There were snapped bones, ripped muscles, and even a guy who just about impaled himself on the blade of his own ice skates. After all the build up, the announcer said that not just in one case, or a few cases, but in a staggering amount of cases these hurt athletes come back stronger, faster, and more determined than before.

I scheduled a doctor appointment for tomorrow morning.

It continues to be very difficult not to get off track and be fatalistic about all of this. But with the continued support of my friends, my mom, and of course Lindsey Vonn's horrific gamut of injuries at the 2010 Olympics, I'm hoping to come back swingin.