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.