But why is that other voice so loud?  The voice that says you’re a baby overreacting to a little niggle?  Even with a healthy fear of pain and physical therapy, that voice wouldn’t be silenced.  I had to cut hills, intervals, long runs, and slash my mileage by nearly half, but I could keep running without pain while my leg healed.  It strikes me now as pathological: the fact I could run pain-free made me wonder whether I should be training harder.

In the end, a month at 60% mileage, and a tempo run or a short race each week hardly had any impact on my race times.  On a perfect day, I might have run 90s better on a 10K.  I don’t think that’s insignificant, a 90s PR is an accomplishment to be proud of, but it’s surprising how little running it takes to maintain the training you’ve banked.  I don’t have much natural speed; I expected that 10K pace to decay from only tempo runs at half-marathon pace, but on race day it slipped out smooth as a stream.  I think a two week break with no speedwork would’ve been an imperceptible loss of fitness.  A little more laziness and hypochondria a month earlier might have saved my final race.

By way of summary, I started a half-marathon training cycle, 19 weeks from late December to early May, and planned two tune-ups for April an 8K and a 10K.  I completed 13 weeks of training before I felt the glimmer of a hamstring injury, and improvised my way through the two tune-up races.  Last weekend was my goal half-marathon; I chose to pace a friend for 11 miles instead of racing.

In spite of falling short of my ‘A’ race, I’m happy with my running this spring.  I loved the two races I finished; I had a blast at both of them and raced better than I expected.  I knew my chances might be better if I traded them both for the half, but my priority was to secure at least one finish of any distance.  After so much time away, I thought it would be better to pass through all the stages of training to racing, both physical and mental.  Becoming too attached to any particular outcome might have aborted some parts of the process, and I’m glad I resisted.  I became reacquainted with what it feels like to train, easy, hard and in-between.  I played with a good selection of different workouts, hills long and short, paces slow, medium and fast, all the way from 11:45 mpm to 8:15 mpm.  It was hard, but the rhythm was also familiar, like coming home.

The only wish I didn’t satisfy is to get back on the trails.  Agility on uneven surfaces wasn’t what I would’ve wished for last fall.  The warmest Toronto winter ever didn’t give me much of a chance to practise on hard-packed snow either, which would’ve been a nice, tame warm-up for spring trail running.  Soon I hope to splash some mud on this blank space between.

While I can’t dispute that healing might have gone faster if I hadn’t raced, there was steady improvement after each race, too.  I’ve decided that I can’t risk racing a third time, but it was important to line up at least once this spring.  It marks a year since I signed up for my last race, the Santa Barbara Endurance Race 25K which I didn’t line up for.  I had a bad fever the night before; eventually the flu went into my chest and lungs and bloomed there into pneumonia.  When I was hospitalised for those complications, doctors found a tumour wrapped around my spinal cord.

The road back has been too long, too many loving hands have cooked me hot meals, led me around the block or down to the ocean, cradled my head when I shed tears of anger and frustration.  The second, third, nth… chances I’ve been given deserve more care and respect than I’ve been showing them.  Running is so elemental, I forget that none of us is entitled to it.

The usual test of whether you can safely keep running on an injury is whether it changes your gait, but I also use a more conservative indicator to check progress: can I change my gait to make it hurt?  If so, I probably am making subtle changes to avoid pain, even if I may not perceive it.  For a while, a heavy heel strike or a pothole would send a bolt of white-hot agony up the back of my leg.  For the 5 days before the race, I could still feel the stringy tendons but couldn’t make them jangle any more.

For training purposes, I would’ve considered the leg healed but in the caution stage of returning to full mileage and speedwork.  For racing purposes, well… the leg wasn’t good enough to go all in, and neither was my race fitness.  Covering the distance would be no problem, I had a big aerobic base before I got injured and raw endurance is slow to decay.  I had run one tempo and one 8K race in the past 3 weeks, both of them roughly at half-marathon pace (9:10 – 9:30 mpm).  Other than that however, no paced running of any kind, which meant I wouldn’t have any other gears to shift into.  No pace strategy necessary then!  Ride that one gear and don’t let up until the end.

How It Went Down

Unlike Harry’s 8K, I didn’t check my splits, my leg still needed monitoring but not coddling.  I occasionally clicked a lap here and there if I noticed a marker.  Mostly I tried to keep an even effort, staying smooth on the downhills and maintaining momentum on the few inclines, the occasional headwind through a wind tunnel of sky scrapers.  I noted how uniform and suburban the shops and cafes are through the miles uptown (at least they’re charmingly compact) then the grittier tattoo parlours, the odd strip club packed even tighter and closer to the curb, as we crossed Bloor St. into downtown.  In a flash we sank into a canyon of office buildings, turned and faced the Blue Jays‘ park topped with its smirking bronze gargoyles.  There was another turn and the rest is a nauseous blur.  My clearest memory is the distinctive clink of a steel drum band.  I vaguely wondered why I was feeling so sick, and how I could make it stop.

To me, 10K is a short race; my daily run lasts half an hour longer.  It’s a span of time that’s short enough that I don’t need or want much in the way of entertainment, or distraction.  Everyone needs encouragement, but if I’m racing well, the pain is usually too intense in the latter half for much to penetrate.  This race had incredible, tireless volunteers that smashed the mean-spirited stereotype of vapid teens.  Though I do think that stage of life can be painfully self-conscious and self-centred, their unabashed enthusiasm and limitless energy sliced through the churning, green haze I was running in.  “Go Random STRANGER, GO!”  Sometimes, they entertained spectators and themselves as much as us.  At one water stop, “Water, then Gatorade?”  “Water, then Gatorade!”  Humour is fuel, too.

I seem to have a fondness for finish times with seconds in the single digits lately.  My last two finishes were xx:07, xx:04, and now 52:05.  If I go for xx:06, I’ll mess up the possible straight for sure.  That’s 34s over my 10K PR; this is an easier course in better conditions but I wasn’t expecting it to be close.  I do know race volunteers contributed directly to my last two splits, 4:59 and 5:02 (8:02, and 8:07 mpm respectively); I don’t remember the last time I ran even 1K that fast — at least 3 years I’d guess.  Regardless, I wouldn’t have had the courage, then or now for that matter, to plan on charging hard down hill on a touchy hamstring.  Overall, the pace was almost a minute per mile quicker than my half-marathon tempo and the 8K two weeks ago, but I appear to have executed my race plan.  I held one gear from what I can tell with my meagre lap splits.

Race Deets

The course is dead simple.  It runs along Yonge Street, Toronto’s main commercial and cultural thoroughfare, from north to south, takes 3 dog-leg turns to the west and ends up at Exhibition Place by the lake.  Like Harry’s Spring Run-Off, this is also put on by the Canada Running Series, and much of what I reviewed about Harry’s 8K applies here too: big, expensive, well-organised.  Needless medals again.  Porta-potties were adequate, but the staging area is more cramped, so expect to wait through some lines.  One aspect I’m unable to review is water stops.  I don’t hydrate for 10K or less.

Baggage check and claim were efficient, but as this is a point-to-point race, logistics are more complicated.  This year you had to use the race bags given and not your own.  I found them to be too small to pack a change of clothes and an extra pair of shoes.  I have Raynaud’s syndrome which makes me more vulnerable to hypothermia if I stay in wet clothes after I stop running, so changing out completely is more important to me, but on a rainy day the race bags would’ve been inadequate for most runners.  Unlike Harry’s two weeks ago, transportation to and from this race takes time and exposure to whatever the weather brings.  For a $60 registration fee, this limit on warm, dry clothes seems petty.

Getting to and from this race requires planning.  The start is accessible by TTC but it’s only useful to get back to the start at the end of the race.  On Sundays, the subway doesn’t begin running in time for the 9am start.  From Eglinton Station, the staging area is about half a mile (800m) north.  There’s a limited amount of street parking in residential areas nearby, or you can park at the Ex near the finish.  For either of these options it’s best to pay for the race shuttles to get you to one end or the other.  From the finish area, the 509 streetcar will take you from Exhibition Place to Union Station, but Sunday schedules are quickly overwhelmed by the number of finishers.  Don’t expect to board unless you can finish in under an hour and won’t be hanging around for the food, beer or music.  Instead, walk to Spadina Ave. and Fort York Blvd. and pick up the 510 streetcar southbound.  It will turn east and bring you to Union Station, too.  Otherwise, it’s about a mile and a half (2.5 km) walk from the finish area to Union Station, less if you can take the 511 streetcar on Bathurst northbound to Bathurst Station.  If rain is in the forecast, public transportation from the finish is impractical.

My Excuses

I didn’t set any expectations for this race. In over 50 races, it was the first time I lined up uncertain of the limits of a budding injury. I’ve raced while gimpy before, but in those cases I clearly knew where the boundaries were. See, that’s the smart way to race while hurt (if you must), and I’ve been coached by smart people for most of my running history. I’m thrilled that I took the chance to run on that golden day, but it still could work out to be one of the more bone-headed choices I’ve ever made.

On my side, my hamstring isn’t too bad yet. I can still run on it, and 10 days of reduced training had proved to be well spent. The race is short, a distance I showed I could handle without damage earlier this week, if I ran easy. On bonehead’s side, the course is hilly — no beefy elevation changes but steep ups and downs that had also proven to be painful earlier this week. Another factor that works against me: I’m prone to recklessness in racing. Adrenaline surges, the frenetic tap-tap-tap of other feet propels mine, and I push considerably harder than I would on any training run, no matter my intentions.

How It Went Down

I ran a tightly controlled 11:40 for the first 2K (9:23 mpm). For reference, that’s 15-30s slower than my half-marathon pace, but 1:30-2:00 per mile faster than any run all week. I don’t believe I took a breath those opening 2K. Then I dipped my toe into a slightly faster cadence, but didn’t hold it, tentatively pushing and pulling back. I closed out another earnestly cautious 2K at 11:39. Throughout this portion, I could feel my hamstring and my knee, the sort of tugging that keeps me up at night, but no pain. I was halfway done though, hadn’t worked very hard yet, and some runners around me were beginning to slump in the shoulders. We were winding in and out of a wooded area by the pond. There was a faintly metallic smell of mud, and branches encroached with tender new buds. If not for the insistent drumming of rubber on asphalt, I could’ve imagined us on a trail. That longing broke my focus. I ran to feel the air, the rhythmic puff of breath, the swish of arms, and heat in my legs. I ran on the scent of sweet rot, wet pine, baked clay, smoky sage, and dewy green eucalyptus.

8K is terribly short. I had at least 3 more miles worth of trail dreams to play through when we came too soon to the final push to the finish. From the exasperated grunts of several runners around me who surrendered to a walk, you would’ve thought we were on an epic climb. On the flip side of that coin, two kamikaze runners blasted by us all with their hearts in their quads. Their enthusiasm and nerve was contagious — I almost went with them. Instead, I laughed at myself and wished them well. The hill is just about the same length and grade as the repeats I’d been doing, roughly 300m at 7%, the very hill reps that I cut from training to heal my hamstring.

47:24 clock, 46:04 chip. It’s a soft PR, but the previous one was hot and even softer. At 100%, I might have gone for sub-45 so not too far off, and maybe even 45:xx would’ve been ambitious on this twisting, rolling course. More than the time, I’m happy my left hamstring made it. I won’t know the full consequences for a couple of days. That’s my usual pattern with injuries, but I’m guardedly optimistic.

The Deets

Harry’s Spring Run-Off in Toronto (as opposed to Vancouver, which runs earlier) is the first of a series in central Canada put on by the aptly named Canada Running Series. As such, it’s well-organised, accurately measured, thoroughly marshalled, big and expensive. At $60, it’s easily the highest fee of any race I’ve run, 10K or shorter.  There are ample port-a-potties, lots of friendly volunteers, quick and efficient packet pick-up, and bag checks. This year there was a size limit for checked bags, a small backpack, which I thought was reasonable for a short race. Corrals have adequate space, and are clearly marked. CRS is nothing if not a polished machine, accustomed to handling crowds of runners who all want to do the same thing, right this very minute. The race has an atmosphere that’s reminiscent of the Rock ‘n’ Roll series of marathons, a comfortable, if somewhat mass-produced personality typical of corporate franchises — ironic, in light of the fact that CRS is over 20 years old and homegrown.

The course is run in High Park, closed to traffic for the race, so parking is a problem. However, the start time is a civilised 10am, allowing for runners to take the subway even if they have to depart from the farthest ends of the system. The High Park TTC station is within sight of the race tents.

I’ve spectated in previous years but it was my first time running this race, in spite of its prominence in the TO running scene. I’m a little dismayed and somewhat embarrassed that there are medals. Really? Is this what my hometown has come to, that a boutique distance race can only survive with professional race directors, soaring fees, and a shiny object? Apart from that, I liked the race. It’s a pretty course, it’s fun, and not so long or challenging that you have to be in top shape to run it. I would not consider it an ideal venue for a PR however, even if you’re a strong hill runner, due to several tight turns, some on inclines.  If you aren’t fast enough for the first corral (<41:00) expect to cope with congestion on the narrower pedestrian paths.

The first pair I tested was a beautiful blue, and I hated them.  They were simultaneously mushy and clunky.  Every day I laced them up I noticed how heavy they were compared to my lithe Mizuno Elixirs.  The toe-off was sluggish, my feet were deaf to the surface they were running on, going downhill had no more impact than going up.  On trails, they rode like a tank over all obstacles smaller than a tangerine, but strangled any agility I might have had hopping on larger rocks or roots.

Many runners stop testing at this point.  We don’t get any money or compensation, sometimes not even the shoes.  Except for the elites maybe, who do the majority of testing, we run for the love of it.  If test shoes rob you of the joyful runs you could be having, why keep going with them?  I love running.  God knows I have to, with the skills I have.  I love science, too.  The scientist in me hates a spoiled experiment, as ill-conceived as shoe testing may be.  So, I clomped in those beautiful, hateful blue shoes for a hundred miles.

I’ve made my share of mistakes buying shoes.  Especially when I was a poor student, I lived with, and ran in those mistakes, for three or four hundred miles before I let myself forget them.  However, the pretty blue shoes weren’t just loathsome, I was asked to describe how loathsome, and precisely what I thought made them loathsome.  Further, what specifically did I think would make me loathe them less?

I didn’t have many good answers for that first pair of test shoes, but the questions put me on the producer side of the transaction for the first time.  What’s mushy to me is pillowy luxury to someone.  When I clomp, someone feels securely supported, safe from injury.  A version of those blue shoes is in production, and they are loved by many.  They’re intended for a different runner than I am, with different preferences.  By the time the test was over, I’d literally run 500 miles in someone else’s shoes imagining what they liked, how they ran, and what they expected from their shoes.

As in all exercises of this kind, I uncovered what I have in common with that different runner.  On a whim, I took the blue shoes on a long road run.  Trail shoes don’t typically do well on pavement, but the context of experiment encourages you to play on all kinds of surfaces, on all types of runs and speeds.  When I’m stretching out my long runs into the 18-20 mile range after neglecting them for a while, I am that different runner those loathsome blue shoes were made for.  They are mercifully forgiving on those final miles.

I’ve now logged several hundred miles in different test models, and managed to find common ground with most of those different runners.  Unless the test shoe is very similar to whatever I’m currently running in, I can hardly bear to lace them up for the first two weeks, or roughly 60 miles.  Strangely enough, it’s not my feet that are picky, it’s my brain.  My head doesn’t take well to change.  The shoes I spend my own money to replace again and again remain ones I initially chose myself, but the range of shoes I’m able to run in is much larger than I would have guessed.  I have flat duck feet, and I pronate.  When I ask for shoe advice, I’m invariably directed to much more supportive shoes than I’d choose myself.  I can, and have, run many miles safely in such shoes.  I’ve run as many miles, safe from injury, in neutral shoes, trail shoes, and light performance shoes.  As far as I can determine, shoes have little to do with injury whether it’s me doing the choosing, or the specialty shop owner, or the mysteriously unnamed wear test czar.  My injuries stem from too much training of one kind or another, or more fundamental weaknesses that aren’t much affected by shoes.  I’ve checked, by daring to take my running life into my own hands, and going back to run in the very same pair of shoes after healing the injury.

My feet, my legs, my running gait in total have turned out to be much more adaptable than I imagined.  After running more or less full-time for a month in the mushy blue shoes, I gratefully returned to my much loved Elixirs to find them curiously temperamental and unyielding.  Like travelling to a foreign land, wearing unfamiliar shoes sharpens my view of what characteristics I gravitate to and why.  The Mizuno Elixir is firm, flexible and transmits quite a bit of road feel through the forefoot.  In particular, they have a certain sweet spot of cadence and tempo.  When I strike those notes, my shoes make me want to dance.  When I don’t, they remind me I’m running like an old lady.  It goes without saying that some days, there’s a good reason I’m running like an old lady thankyouverymuch.

Another surprise is that considering a pair of shoes in such detail for a mandated period of time has led me to expect less of them.  Some shoes are better suited to certain kinds of terrain or paces.  I try my best to resist looking to my shoes if I don’t possess the skills to do that kind of running.  If my hip hurts I cut back, and wait a few days before I think of shopping for new shoes.  Humility is working better for me at injury prevention than technology.

Nowadays I expect about as much from my running shoes as I do from my clothes.  I love my super high-tech, triple turbo laminate, windproof, waterproof, bulletproof shell, but I don’t ask it to make me faster.  It does a terrific job in single-digit temps when I couldn’t run without it — I promptly forget about it the moment I zip it up.  Likewise, my favourite shoes let me forget they’re there, but I don’t ask them to erase my frailties.  Shoes started out as apparel.  I’ve stopped kidding myself that running shoe design has evolved much farther.

A week ago, the up-and-back was the second in a small local trail series, about 30 finishers.  The podium finishes were predictably filled by local runners, but Lance Armstrong took fourth.  The race series is such a low-key affair it would’ve stayed completely under the radar if not for his tweet about it.  It’s a tough course, climbing almost 4000 ft. in a little over 4 miles.  San Ysidro is the only front country trail where the incline alone forces me to walk the whole way up.  Even at a powerhike, I need to pace my walking to hedge against trashing my legs for the steep return.  There are technical segments that slow the descent too, but not as rugged at the moment as upper Romero Canyon Road.  The dry, upper elevations are littered with loose rocks, with blunted angles and more susceptible to erosion, less painful anyway than the shale on Romero Road.  San Ysidro lulls you with the insistent monotony of its demanding ascent to the ridge, switchback after switchback on sandy yellow limestone, but then around a hairpin turn the trail can transform to a stunning red sandstone, great towers of it above you on fire from the sun.  It’s scattered with startling moments of beauty like this.

The surface varies from dark, packed soil, some scrambling on exposed rock, sandy loose stones small and large, and loose gravel with uniform grains about the size of rice.  The climb is not quite even.  The lower two miles meanders a little following San Ysidro creek, and then you climb in earnest for the upper half.  The land becomes more arid; coming down that slope is more skiing than running.  In half a dozen spots, the mountainside is so steep the traverse has almost sheared away.  A few days after the trail race, I could still make out the line that most of the runners had chosen and key foot plants that had given way.  In spite of the rain, the geology here offers little foothold for grasses to anchor the gravel.  A slip down the side would be a fast trip concluding with an exclamation at one of many boulders.  At each of those treacherous crossings, I breathed a little prayer and speculated with some awe if Eric Forte and those behind him had forged the courage and skill to run through there.

It feels so right that I don’t seem to notice that race-shaped vacuum.  The SBER 25K that I’ve ambitiously registered for is now in doubt, which would normally fill me with anxiety and disappointment.  Not this time.  My biggest frustration is that I can’t run mountain trails if there’s rain in the forecast.  Under other circumstances, I might attempt it, but I can’t take the risk of another fall in slippery conditions.  I’m missing out.

On what I’m not sure, but it’s not a PR I’m thinking of.  Maybe I’m missing the chance to see morning fog spill over the mountains in a slow-motion avalanche, while the sun climbs golden and benevolent over the sea.

My habits as a trail runner are very different from the way I run on roads.  On roads, I gather a flood of data: date, time, distance, route, heart rates, effort, time for each mile, cadence, calories, altitude gained and lost, two different algorithms for effort, by heart rate and approximated VO2max by pace… in total 15 independent measurements, a further 30 calculations, trends, and statistics based on those measurements.  The nature of road running permits control, and therefore comparison.  Data can hold meaning.  As a scientist it is anathema to my nature to discard data.

On trails the same data is recorded, but my memories are richer than any number.  As much as I can, I write about my run while I re-fuel in the half hour afterwards.  My thoughts are chiefly about the trail, what I saw, what has changed, where I got lost because I always get lost, and what may remain to be discovered.  There is less of me, and more of the world.  I feel the urge to go farther and faster, not so much for personal satisfaction, but out of fascination — to see, touch, smell more of what could be above, below, around that bend…

Outside the tidy limits bounded by curbs, there is a world that defies control, and my meagre collection of data captures nothing about it.  Performance measures, my own or anyone else’s, taste a bit flat.

This doesn’t make for good racing.  For me a good race effort requires drumming up some aggression.  Aggression I don’t seem to feel for running these days.  I haven’t stopped dreaming about running though; I flit aimlessly around vague ambitions of leaving a tread-print over every trail in the front and back country, top to bottom, but it doesn’t amount to a goal.  I don’t know how many miles that is, how many thousands of feet I’d have to climb, or how many weeks I have to do it.  I’m uncharacteristically content to let those numbers rest in ambiguity.

They say you should make your goals specific, so you can judge your progress towards them and take pride when you’ve achieved them.  I’m not impervious to the sway of ego, but right now my imagination is not captive to self-improvement.  Self-esteem, self-realisation, self-anything seems beside the point.  If I should manage to trek every trail within 50 miles of the mat where I dry my muddy shoes, I’d probably just want to do it again.

There are new water crossings in places where I never even heard flow before, and the creek is running so strongly, its music followed me most of the way.  The wind whistled a counterpoint, joined by the low hum of… swarms of killer bees?  I could hear them from the other side of the ridge.  We heard some a couple of weeks ago in Rattlesnake Canyon, too.  I don’t know what they were so angry about, but I didn’t stick around to verify my supposition that they were precisely killer bees.

It was to be a modest test of my rib.  I wanted fairly simple footing so I’d be able to focus on the form I need to cushion the break.  In my impatience to get back into the hills, I might have been wilfully delusional.  Trail conditions at this time of year are impossible to predict, and really all the slopes in the Santa Ynez mountains are a challenge to run at full lung capacity.  Romero road was more technical than I or my shoes could handle at running speeds.  It turns out that the corners of shale potatoes penetrate the rock plate of my Mountain Masochist trail shoes rather easily.  I also left a little more skin behind.  Honestly, I don’t know if I can afford to replenish my running wardrobe with this sudden fascination for gravity experiments.  This time however, I tucked in my shoulder and offered only the skin off my left elbow.

My rib stayed well protected.  For the most part, I feel hopeful about learning to accommodate it.  Going downhill turns out to be limited by my skill; if I concentrate, my legs can absorb the shock better than they do on asphalt.  Going uphill is limited by the supply of oxygen which isn’t quite what it used to be, but I can work with it for now.

I was surprised to discover how much of a difference my new hydration pack makes.  I’m using a Salomon Advanced Skin S-Lab pack and the snug vest gives my rib a little extra compression which helps with errant footfalls.  With a full reservoir, the pack weighs perhaps 5 lbs. which I dismissed as insignificant.  On my flat, long run last week it was negligible.  I suppose I knew that it would take more energy to lift a pack 2800 feet than to tote it across 18 miles, but I didn’t expect to feel it so emphatically in my calves, quads, hamstrings, hips — more or less everywhere.  They were unanimously sluggish.  I thought this was my cross to bear with a cracked rib, until I noticed my legs felt better after climbing a couple of thousand feet.  By then I’d drained about half of the reservoir.  Now I’m toying with the idea of weighting the pack with a brick and running like that every day.  Hmm, well maybe I’d better heal the rib first…

At the university, it was a little cloudy and damp before I started out, so I didn’t expect much from the views.  From 1800 feet, I could see Santa Barbara and Montecito, misty and distant, the ocean not quite as glittering as it usually is.  Around a canyon and a few hundred feet higher, I saw a marine layer was forming, bubbling up mystically over the water.  Another 20 minutes of climbing, and it had thickened.  There were undulating waves of fog where the sea should be.  The Channel Islands rose up in this snowy ocean, and soft fingers of mist seduced the shore like the tentative caresses of a new lover.

Fractured ribs can take anywhere from 6-8 weeks to heal completely, but I can look forward to less pain over the next 3 weeks.  Ribs can’t be set, and unless the bone is out of alignment there’s no intervention while it heals.  In my case, the fracture is supported by lots of muscles around the chest and shoulders, too.  This is both good and bad.  It’s good for healing the rib in its correct position, but affects how much strength I can exert with my left arm and shoulder.  Attempting a push-up for example, makes my eyes water.

The best part about a cracked rib is that you can do virtually nothing to help or hurt the healing process.  This will infuriate control freaks, but as a reformed one, it’s awesome.  There’s no physical therapy exercises to do, no worries about lingering muscle imbalances that could bite you later.  I find it surprisingly liberating to know that simple pain will protect my rib from my own folly.

Even with twice the recommended dose of NSAID on the label (but still 30% less than what’s allowed under my prescription), inflating my lungs to their fullest extent hurts, and when it hurts with every breath, you either slow down or stop running.  The simplicity of it is beautiful.  Pounding hard with your heel, forefoot, or whatever, it doesn’t matter — all kinds of hard foot strikes hurt.  You learn to do what it takes to mitigate that impact with the muscles in your feet, legs, and hips, or stop running.  You learn to do these things in a matter of a few minutes, refine them continuously while running, and remember those lessons for the next day.  The prospect of pain sharpens the mind — I’ve discovered powers of retention that rival an elephant’s.  I was only half-joking when I wrote once that a cracked rib might be the best training tool to happen to me.