Three Days To Go. I'm Getting Nervous.

Ok. Somebody needs to turn off my internet. As the surgery day approaches, I’ll admit that I have officially gone into full-blown panic mode. There are times that I wonder if I should just cancel the whole surgery and just deal with the pain that I have. As they say, better the devil you know than the devil you don't.

So in an attempt to calm my nerves, I usually wind up turning to Google to try and find some examples of people who recovered quickly from this type of surgery. What I usually find are cases filled with people who experience longer than expected recovery times and complaints of intense pain for the first few days following the surgery. However, even in these “worse case” scenarios things seems to eventually calm down though, and when there is an update a year post-op, it usually is the person happy with the final outcome and willing to do the surgery again.

But a year later? I don’t have a year. I’ll be lucky if I don’t go crazy after 3 or 4 weeks of no running. But I do need to smart about this. Setting artificial milestones (like be able to fully train for a marathon by Jan 1, 2010) is probably not a great attitude to have. That will be exactly 8 weeks post surgery, and while I hope that I will be able to handle some running at that point, it’s probably more realistic to figure out a 3 to 4 day a week cross-training program to supplement my running.

If there’s one thing I learned from marathon running, whether it be rehab or racing, it’s not how you start, it’s how you finish.