I have today (Friday) off. One of the benefits of working for a religious organization is that Easter weekend is a big deal. I have both Friday and Monday off. I'll be spending a lot of it working on school stuff and getting some errands done, but Easter Sunday itself is open other than church, so I should have time for relaxing this weekend. My daughter went to California with my mother-in-law to visit family for the holiday, so we're not doing any big family gathering. My son has off work so he's going to come over late afternoon and we're going to do steaks on the grill for our Easter dinner. Very low-key and relaxed!
Meanwhile, I started my day off today with a visit to the podiatrist to take an official look at the hallux limitus thing that the freebie podiatrist diagnosed. I'd done some googling about podiatrists in the area, check out Healthgrades and such, and chose one near me without really expecting to get an appointment that fast. But I was able to get in today. Woo! Or, not so woo, depending on how you look at it. Good thing I did my research because apparently I'm going to have a long-term personal relationship with this new podiatrist.
Turns out, I've got issues. My BFF/BQF Kate refers to our slightly-past-middle-age as "The Maintenance Years." Time for some serious maintenance on my feet.
X-rays revealed pretty bad bone spurs on that left big toe, and very little space for cartilage. I looked at the X-ray and thought, "Wow. No wonder I'm in pain!" Sometimes I have to get absolute proof that I have a right to hurt--for some reason, I always have a lurking suspicion that I'm just being a whiner or a hypochondriac.
The end result is that I'll be taking some more of my day off this afternoon to go to a foot specialist store and buy appropriate inserts; I've got an appointment for a cortisone shot before I go on my vacation to try to at least get me through that as best as possible; and I'll be scheduling surgery for sometime this summer when I've got a couple of weeks together to heal.
And bonus news: It's also in the other foot, just not as advanced. So I'll get to have all this fun again in a year or so.
The silver lining? He kept referring to me as "a runner" and "an athlete." Cool.
I am going to try to keep running. However, now I won't be mentally abusing myself about whining when my foot starts aching. It has every right to hurt!
Not much else to report on the fitness and health front, as I've been down with another chest cold--or side effects to my new prescription inhaler (as yes, one set of side effects that are fairly common mimic having a really bad chest cold; go figure)--for the last week. Running was out of the question, so I had to make a difficult decision this week about the "graduation 5k" for the running program I'm in.
First of all, I already knew that I had a speaking engagement that same weekend, all weekend. It's in town, but I'll be doing a lot of up-front leadership Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, which always takes it out of me. Plus, the timing of trying to do the 5k on Sunday morning and then getting showered and dressed and back to the speaking engagement in time for Sunday morning worship would've been pretty tight--everything would have had to go absolutely perfectly to make it, and we know that rarely happens. I was concerned that I wouldn't do well at the 5k because I was so tired from the speaking, and I wouldn't do well at the speaking because I was so tired from the 5k, and everyone would lose.
Then, when I got sick for a second time this week and lost more training time, I realized it just wasn't in the cards. There's a fine line between "being determined" and "being stupid," and I was perilously close to the stupid end of that spectrum. I'm therefore cancelling my involvement in the April 5k, and I'm not going to do the rest of the training runs with the group because I'm too far behind them now, but I will keep working on training on my own through their program schedule. We get emails every week with our training schedule for the week, so I'm going to be starting back up again where I was when I got sick this second time and go from there. I'll set a date for my own personal 5k to prove to myself I can do it, and I still plan on running the Color Run in May--that's now going to be my first official public 5k.
Pic from a couple of weeks ago on the canal. It's much sunnier today.
I'm feeling better today, though, so I'm hoping to get out for at least a walk on the canal this afternoon, maybe with Sammy. We'll see how both he and I are doing later.