Acceptance
2026 is off and running. Well, the calendar is but I’m not. I strained my glute medius in early November and tried to run through it. This is the muscle that among other things helps stabilize our gait as we run. I continued to train through November, even ran a 10K, and did some longer training runs of 9 and 10 miles. I did start doing some specific strength training for the abductors and thought I was making progress. If it felt sore, a day or two of water running did the trick. But moving into December and then toward the end of month, it got worse and after a treadmill run and some running drills the day after Christmas, it worsened — to the point where even walking was painful. Thus, my gait was off, and I knew enough not to run on it. Or even walk very far. I had gone from hoping to top 1,500 miles for 2025 to barely exceeding 1,400 (1,412) miles. (Still, that was a notable 11% increase over 2024, a year after coming back from a torn proximal hamstring.) In early January, I have a PT appointment and expect to come away with a treatment plan. Going from planning to run a four-mile race on New Year’s to an uncertain timeline for training has required me to embrace acceptance.
Acceptance has a number of definitions: receiving something; being admitted to a group; agreement with a set of beliefs; a willingness to tolerate something. It is this latter definition where I find myself. Run training can be a two-edged sword. Maybe more so as we age. Our capacity to recover recedes, yet our memories of quick rebounds from various types of injuries remains. It is important to update my expectations. The good news is I can water-run without constraint and if anything, that seems to help. It seems rowing and stationary bike likewise don’t aggravate it. Also, there is no limit for working on upper body muscles and I can manage the leg extension and hamstring curl machines without issue. The importance of this was underscored hearing woes from two people on New Year’s Eve about chronically sore knees that were likely leading to replacements in early 2026. I am quite sure the consistent work I do on those machines to strengthen the quads and hamstrings has warded off issues in my knee joints.
Fortunately, this current malady is not a joint issue. It is muscular. There is no doubt some imbalance lurking that has surfaced. If that can be resolved, the muscles will regenerate and serious training resumed. Will that be five days or five weeks? Time will tell and I’m lucky, even blessed, to have a skilled PT I have worked with over the years helping me resolve things.
Many things in our lives present hurdles to clear. Every creative project we take on has that. My second running book, Staying With It, is replete with questions of how to best proceed. While I believe this project will happen, the timeline remains uncertain. I’ve been reading Rick Rubin’s, The Creative Act. In his essay, Patience, Rubin suggests “Time is something that we have no control over. So patience begins with acceptance of natural rhythms. The implied benefit of impatience is to save time by speeding up and skipping ahead of those rhythms. Paradoxically, this ends up taking more time and using more energy. It’s wasted effort.”
I think this proves true in injury recovery too. Our bodies have a natural rhythm and skipping ahead of that often leads to more time off. Our ability to recover changes as we age. We can deny that or work with it. That’s acceptance.