Despite the lack of entries lately, I haven’t fallen off the running wagon again. Though - if you want to be all technical – I am not actually running, but I’m training. I’m stretching and icing and strengthening and for a while I was even pumping myself up with ibuprofen, and for the past few days I’ve been spending time on the elliptical machines. Not quality time so much as half hour long monotonous segments, but that’s all they let you do at the UO gym.

Meanwhile the rest of my life has been steadily descending into chaos. Not the kind of happy chaos in which I most often cheerfully reside, but a newer, more frantic, more strung out chaos that I’m hoping will end in approximately – oh, let’s just pick a time frame – two months.

This new chaos derives mostly from the fact that, in addition to training for a marathon, I am currently finishing my master’s thesis and starting an internship. Those of you who talk to me often are by now confused, no doubt, about why this “finishing” of the thesis has been going on for nearly as long as the beginning and middle of the process. It’s mostly because after I thought the writing was done I started with the layout, and then the layout expanded and grew and clamored for more images, and then the images multiplied and divided and thirsted for more text and layout. So now I have a hundred and fifty page full color monster that still has no conclusion and is going to cost as much to print as six months in southeast Asia. Not that I’m sitting here weighing the pros and cons of that option or anything.

The goal was to turn in the final draft on Thursday, but I blew that off when two friends from D.C. cruised into town on their way to Portland, so now the goal is Monday. I’m really, really going for Monday.

In the midst of the thesis finishing, everything else has gone to shit. Weeks-old phone and email messages languish unanswered, boxes from last week’s garage sale gather dust in my truck bed. I have no fresh food in the house. I have nothing to wear to the wedding I’m going to next weekend. With seven weeks to the marathon, I have no airplane ticket to Alaska and I’m about $2500 short of my fundraising goal. I have become a flaky disaster.

So just for the record: Kira, Andrew, & Aerin, congratulations on the walkathon! Jen, congratulations on the race! Joshua, I’m sorry I keep not showing up. Matt, you will eventually get a birthday present, and it will be cool. Lisa, I will call you back. Julie, I’m sorry I didn’t get to read your essay. Emilee, I hope your hip is holding up (we can limp to the finishline together). And everyone else who drops in here, I’ll try to be less scarce. For the moment I’m going to go hang out with my old friend Sleep, who it turns out is a terrific antidote for my new friend Forgot to Eat Dinner.

“How much for this book?” the woman asked me, eyeing me suspiciously, holding up East, West.

“Three dollars,” I said.

“Three dollars?” she practically hollered. “For a paperback?” And she dropped it back into the box.

I breathe deeply and hope that somehow raising money for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society justifies this soul crushing garage sale I am taking part in. This garage sale in which three dollars is seen as an obscene and predatory price for a mere book, never mind that it is by Salman Rushdie, winner of the Booker Prize, winner of the Booker of Bookers prize. Never mind that it is Rushdie’s only collection of short stories, a moving and brilliant compilation of vignettes that will transport you around the world. Never mind that the book would cost fourteen dollars new and that the three dollars I am futilely trying to collect would go entirely towards fighting cancer.

No, all that matters here in the Big Lots parking lot is that this book is a paperback, and a paperback should cost a quarter, fifty cents if it’s thick. Deep, deep breaths.

I guess I am exactly the wrong combination of naïve and snobby to be good at a garage sale. Early in the day I have not yet learned that asking for “a couple dollars” in exchange for some valuable item like a coffee maker will trigger either a look of disdain (what do you take me for?) or a bitter, reluctant production of a wallet, and a slow, careful extraction and smoothing of two single bills.

Early in the day I do not yet expect people to haggle over Banana Republic shirts that are priced, out of equal parts hope and surrender, at a dollar. Early in the day I am still surprised when the very same woman who sniggers at my three dollar book then wanders to Donna’s Mary Kay table and buys sixteen dollars of lotion, handing the money to Donna with a look of reverence and gratitude for this woman who, for just sixteen dollars, provides a skin-type appropriate vial containing the possibility of youth and happiness and beauty. Early in the day I am neither sunburned nor dehydrated nor angry at the world. But soon enough, it’s later.

I don’t have a lot of things to sell. My chilly relationship with possessions comes from seven years of moving semi-annually between closet-sized New York City apartments. I don’t like stuff. I don’t like buying stuff and I don’t like worrying about stuff and I don’t like packing and unpacking stuff and I don’t like when stuff breaks. I rent a single room in a house and it has my drafting table and my rocking chair and too many art supplies and too many books, and this is how I like it. This is a bad foundation for a garage sale.

So I scoured my already second-hand clothes and the bottom shelf of my bookcase and the box of knickknacks I feel guilty throwing away, and I packed up my truck. Arica and Adrienne and Melissa cleaned their closets for me too and filled things out.

There were high points like the mother and daughter who gleefully snatched up an ambitiously priced painting of zebras (thank you, Arica), and the Latina woman who skillfully bargained for an orange button-down with a small, mysterious witch-and-cauldron print, and the old Asian woman who told me that she usually makes her own clothes but she couldn’t resist the shirt with a rainforest pattern that concealed big colorful parrots. But mostly it was a mix of awful and bizarre, like the guy who picked up the glue-gun-looking device and said “What’s this for?” I rolled my eyes and laughed and explained what I myself had just learned - that it was for slicing your seatbelt and cracking open your window in the highly-unlikely-but-apparently-phobia-inducing event of becoming trapped in your car, possibly underwater. And then he said, “How much do you want for it?”

And that was my day. I made one hundred and fifty dollars for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. And all it took was eight hours and my faith in humanity.

Even among my non-athlete friends I have found an average of one degree of separation between everyone and an injured-while-running person. Pick a random person and their (sister / dad / girlfriend / someone) (tore / fractured / pulled / something) his or her (knee / hip / ankle / somepart) while running.

This reminds me of the time Talley was going to teach me to snowboard. She went to take a quick run while I rented gear, but before I ever made it onto the mountain she was headed to the hospital with a broken wrist. For the next two weeks when I told this to everyone who asked about my snowboarding, they inevitably replied with a story about a friend or family member breaking some really important bone(s) while snowboarding. Two solid weeks of snowboard injury stories essentially vaporized my desire to learn to snowboard.

Several times now when I have explained my knee situation to someone with running-injury knowhow, he or she will reply, “Ah yes! RICE!” Which is some acronym for the things you are supposed to do with an injury, namely ibuprofen, coolness, elevation, and something that begins with the letter R. Reggae, perhaps? Riddles? Robots? I hope it's robots. But I don’t remember. In any case I’m not really doing the RICE thing so much as I’m stretching twice a day, doing leg lifts twice a day, and icing three times a day.

I am also supposed to be taking three to four ibuprofen three times a day (I was told to “Get the big bottle”) but I just can’t bring myself to do this. I half-heartedly pop two or three about twice a day, and even that feels like mild drug abuse. In normal life my habit is to take one ibuprofen, maybe, if I am having the sort of headache or the sort of cramps that are wholly and completely incapacitating. Otherwise I don’t take anything for any reason. I think it comes from this feeling that my body is doing what it needs to do – like raising its temperature to kill bad bacteria – and I shouldn’t mess with that. Which yes, I recognize is not the case with the knee. I do not claim that any logic is operating here. But I don’t like taking so many pills.

Regardless of the undermedication, my knee is feeling much better. It cracks more than it used to, including every time it goes from a locked position to bent, but I’m trying to ignore that. I’m eager to try it out again. Monday, maybe?

As you may have noticed, I haven’t been posting. Because I haven’t been running. Instead I entered a three week period of heavy denial. The denial went something like this: When I run, it hurts my knee. The next day I cannot walk. This is my body telling me that running causes it injury. My body is telling me this when I run for just a few miles. There is no way my body is going to let me run a marathon. Therefore I will not be able to run a marathon, and there is nothing I can do about it.

If I was running a marathon and my head was saying, Jenn, what the fuck are you doing, I am very unhappy, please stop, I know how to say to my head, hang in there, it’s just a little bit farther, or just shut up. But when my knee says to me, step on me and you’ll fall over, I have no good answer.

So for about three weeks I have been feeling ridiculously out of control of this, and I stopped fundraising, and I stopped talking about running, and I basically assumed that I wouldn’t be able to follow through with this whole thing. And on last Saturday morning when I slept in until 9:30, and it was cold and rainy, I didn’t miss running at all. But I felt pretty lousy mentally. I felt like I had given up even though I never seemed to have been given a say in it, and I felt like hiding from everyone who has been encouraging me.

And then yesterday I was instant messaging with Dave, my runner friend who has had superhuman patience for lengthy conversations about my right knee. Which I realize is not such a gripping topic. But Dave will not let me stop talking about running. Many of my friends who are not very athletic – which is most of my friends, and I count myself among them – hear that I hurt my knee and they say, That sucks, you can’t run the marathon right? But Dave will not say this to me. Secretly I have been waiting for Dave to say this so that I can finally say it is out of my hands.

Instead of saying this, however, Dave asks pointed questions about how it hurts and when and where. And then he sends me links to webpages about stretching and advice about ibuprofen. And so I resentfully tried these things for three weeks and thought There! Fuck you! It still hurts. You’re going to tell me to quit now, right? But instead he sent me more links. And finally I said What is the point? How can I run a marathon if my knee hurts whenever I run?

But then he explained it to me, and for the first time it made sense.

My knee is hurting because some little thing inside it is rubbing against some other little thing. It is probably doing this because my thigh muscles are not strong enough. Once the rubbing started, there was swelling, and this swelling made the rubbing much, much worse. So while I could run twelve miles before, now I can hardly run two.

This isn’t the monumental problem I have been taking it for because if I can (a) strengthen my thigh muscles and (b) make all the swelling go away, it won’t happen again. This was the magic secret I didn’t understand. There are fairly reliable ways to accomplish both these things. I don’t know why I didn’t understand it. I guess I was thinking about it more like an allergy: if you’re allergic to milk and you drink it, you get sick. You wait a few days and you feel better… but that doesn’t mean you can start drinking milk again. If milk makes you sick and you drink it every time you feel ok, you’re not too bright. Yet, as it turns out, my body is not actually allergic to running.

So Dave explained this and bam, I realized: I can run this marathon. I have been grim and sulky and totally lethargic for three weeks. And that’s done now. I am going to run this marathon.

I ran on Monday. I ran for an hour, in the freezing cold wind, and it was numbing and headachy but it felt nice to be moving again. And I came back to Patrick’s apartment and put my legs up with a big bag of frozen tortellini on my knees just like I’m supposed to.

And then I woke up on Tuesday, and it was a mess. My right knee felt achy and sore, and when I walked there was pain underneath that shot down into my calf. It was my last day in Quebec City, and my plan was to walk around taking photos. I walked for an hour, which was bearable if I avoided hills. The day was gray and rainy and windy and cold and generally miserable, and I was sad it was my last day.

After lunch I headed out again, but now the pain was so much worse – probably aggravated by the earlier walking – that I had to go down the apartment steps one at a time. After fifteen minutes I found myself leaning against building walls as I walked, and I decided to call it a day. I hobbled back to the apartment, grabbed the tortellini, and got on instant messenger with my runner friend Dave.

Dave says I have runner’s knee. He says I have to take two weeks off and ice three times a day and pop huge amounts of ibuprofen and do leg exercises to strengthen my thighs, which are apparently causing part of the problem. I say this sucks.

Much as I don’t love the running thing, the idea of losing all the endurance that it sucked so much to build up is making me very unhappy. Also, I am a bad sick person. Also, I don’t want to do any long-term damage to my knees, which have been very good to me so far. Also, I’m not convinced that after all this recovery shit, the knee won’t just start hurting again as soon as I start running again. And then what? Because I told everyone I’m running a marathon and I’ve been waking up at 7:30 on Saturday mornings and you better fucking believe I am running a marathon. But what if my knee just doesn’t let me? That would feel so fucking lame.

Also, and let’s not make too big a deal out of this, I kind of feel like going for a run right now. I’m back in Eugene, and it feels like spring here, and I’m sad to have left Quebec. Running right now would feel really good.

First off thanks to everyone who harassed me about not blogging this week. I occasionally wonder if anyone reads this and hooray, at least a couple people do. So sorry I’ve been such a slacker. It happened like this: after my run last Saturday, things were looking good. Sunday is my day off and Monday I woke up ready to run. But my right knee felt off. It didn’t hurt or ache, it just felt… strange. Like there was something clicking a little inside. And when my leg was straight, it didn’t feel trustworthy. I emailed my coach and waited for news.

Coach Phil emailed back that I should take a few days off and ice it regularly. So all week here I was in Quebec City, with nothing to do but work on my thesis by day and eat Patrick’s insanely delicious cooking by night. Also some drinking. All in all it’s been the most productive thesis time I’ve had in months, accompanied by feasting on everything from cheddar leek corn croquets to a veggie version of Ethiopian Doro Wat.

What I haven’t been doing is running, which was fine until Saturday, when I was supposed to get back up to at least 8 miles. But this was officially my last weekend in QC, and it was a sunny, beautiful day, and instead of running Patrick and I went to a bookshop and picked out periodicals for an hour, and then we went to a café and read said periodicals while snacking on croissants filled with cheese and chocolate. And when the rain started falling we walked around some of the old neighborhoods of the lower city, and then we went to a film festival and saw Art School Confidential. And it was all pretty fucking fabulous, but there was no running involved.

So anyway, here I am and it’s Monday and I am going to work on my thesis until five and then I will go running. To be honest this is the part where, if I hadn’t told anyone about my plans to run this marathon, I would quietly duck out. A few years ago I learned about the beauty of putting down a book that I’m not enjoying or turning off a movie that sucks. But I know that in this case what I’m doing is not a complete waste of time, and there are plenty of good reasons to keep doing it. And I know that it’s only for another three months, not even, and then I will have run a marathon, and we will all have raised a lot of money for leukemia and lymphoma. But the biggest motivation at this point is that I don’t want to be a big quitting loser, which is a pretty lame reason to do anything, though for the moment I’m going with whatever works. But a few days ago I was talking to a dear friend, and she told me I was inspiring, and I mostly felt like a complete con.