Michelle’s Marathon Madness: How To Slowly Drain Yourself Of Your Blood Supply Without Noticing

There’s been a bit of a recurring theme to these LA marathon columns recently – snow, and I’m not quite finished with it yet. Remember how after the first lot of snow I said I realised that wasn’t proper snow but the second one was? Well it snowed again and I can confirm, and I promise that this is the last time I say it – this was proper snow.

This snow was the kind of snow you run along in, and suddenly find yourself disappearing down snow holes that you must then gracefully hop out of (unsuccessfully in my case) and pretend that was exactly what you wanted to do. It’s also the kind of snow to be avoided if you’re running in big open spaces. Why? Because in the case of my open spaces, which are all in one area divided by a few roads, the only landmarks are trees and big houses that all look exactly the same. Now that’s fine when you can see the ground because I can see the worn paths that let me know where I am. When there’s 3 feet of snow no chance. It was like running through a foam party (I don’t know why I say that I’ve never actually run through a foam party…) that went on forever where all I seemed to do, whether I went left or right, was end up exactly where I started, and after a couple of times I had no idea where that was either!

So you can imagine I was pretty glad when it all started to melt and I could once run on the pavements I once so hated. Running on that as opposed to rock hard ice felt like running on sponge, and I bounded happily along on my planned 21 mile run on Sunday delighting in how much easier it felt having had to run against the resistance of all that snow.

That was until I got to mile 10.

At mile 10 it became obvious that my bounding along like I was some (very very slow) Olympic marathon runner was not such a good idea. At this point it began to hurt. At the time I thought it hurt a lot, by 14 miles I realised that it hadn’t hurt a lot at 10 miles, it hurt a lot at 14 miles, by mile 18 agony was not the word for how my legs felt. Seriously I think I could have probably laid down, curled up in a ball and just waited for my painful self to die.

But then I’m not the kind of person who does that. I’m far too proud to let anyone see me fail, so even though it hurt more than anything I’d ever felt before, the moment I saw two people come into view I stopped staggering, put on the most poppy song I could find, gave myself a stern talking to and went running past them like it was my first mile (we won’t mention I got the worst stitch ever after doing so and then promptly ran out of water to drink with three miles to go… )

Now I’m pretty sure you think I’m exaggerating. It can’t be that bad can it. Your legs can’t hurt so much that it becomes all encompassing and wipes out everything else, surely…. I can prove otherwise, at around mile 9 I thought my earphone cord was rubbing me a little bit at the base of my arm / side when I was running so I tried to adjust it, but couldn’t really do much so left it. It was about this point that my legs began to hurt and I really didn’t really notice anything else concerning my arm.

Twelve miles later when I’d hit mile 21, stopped and fallen in through my front door, I remembered this slight rubbing so decided to take a look and see if there was a small graze.

There wasn’t. What there was was a 2 inch square open wound that had been bleeding down my arm and side from where my cord had been constantly whipping me. A wound that I’d not felt at all because all my body could focus on was how much my poor little legs hurt. However whilst I may not have noticed this blood pouring down my arm it suddenly became obvious that all the people I’d run past who’d give my arm a funny look weren’t thinking my music was too loud (I was thinking it was ridiculous seeing as I kept turning it down), but obviously watching me slowly drain myself of blood.

And I can tell you now that whilst this wound didn’t hurt whilst I was running it hurts now. A lot. And on the what other people think of it, so far I’ve had a “Oh my GOD!”, “Yuck!”, “Why are you doing this to yourself?”,  and from my mother a very sad look that basically said “I can’t believe I carried you for 9 months and now you’re just destroying yourself” – it should however be noticed on the latter I get the same look even if I get a tiny bruise and is connected to the fact she’s a bit OCD about making sure the things she “owns” look perfect.

But hey all this pain and suffering it’s all part of the marathon experience isn’t it??!

By the way I’m currently one person short of being able to dress my stunning running wound properly. Any volunteers? My last one person attempted involved me discovering the slight issue that I can only bandage it with my arm up, and then once I’ve done that I can’t put it down again!