FORCED LAYOFFS

Whatever your age, when you were younger, you had this picture of how your life might turn out, and you’re never even close. I write this as I’m trying to get Skunky, my 170-pound Vietnamese potbellied pig, off of the porch. He’s like a cat (a heavy cat) caught up a tree, refusing to budge, ignoring all my coaxing. The rescuing fireman in this case is my wife Ellen, who tells me it’s easy to get him down: “Just nudge him with a rake toward the steps on the corner, and he’ll go.” So she says.

People say pigs are so smart. If so, why does Skunky keep doing this? It’s never pleasant for him up on the porch, and he knows he has trouble getting down. It’s cold today, and the sun never makes it to the spot he has chosen. The sun reaches back farther in the yard, where I thoughtfully put down some hay for him to lounge in. But, naturally, he comes up to the porch, where he’s cold and slips on the icy wood. So here I sit, wondering when Ellen will get home from her run, confronted by a snout staring at me from the other side of the sliding glass door. No, I certainly never imagined that my life would take this route. I figured maybe a couple of cats and a hedgehog.

Ellen’s back and there . . . she did it, using an interesting new technique to steer Skunky in the right direction with a rake and then leaning on him with her knees to force him down the stairs, all the while using the rake to keep him from trying to slip out sideways.

Ellen is the lucky one, for now anyway, whether she realizes it or not. Although she’s been having some injury problems of her own, she at least has been able to log her usual 100+ mile weeks.

Having what the doctor said is a pulled right hamstring, I haven’t been able to run a step in three weeks, and I had to cancel plans to defend my California International Marathon title. I pulled the hamstring all the way down where it attaches behind the knee, which the doctor says is especially bad because there’s not much muscle down there, so it won’t heal very quickly. This has already been the longest forced rest I’ve ever taken.

MAKE THE BEST OF A BAD SITUATION? NAH!

People put various spins on my situation, some saying the injury will do me good in the long run, as I could use the time off. On the whole, I’d have to disagree. I can’t say the down time is doing me that much good. This injury blindsided me. I’d never had a major injury, and life dealt me a big surprise. Just like that pig on the porch.

With all the heartbreak that goes hand in hand with trying to be a great runner (or trying to be good at anything, for that matter), you’d think some down time might be a welcome break. For the dedicated athlete, down time is often a mixed blessing. We all need, and look forward to, a rest every now and then. I usually plan on taking some rest immediately after a major marathon effort. It usually works out well. When I run a good marathon, I wouldn’t run again for the rest of the week, even if I wanted to. Also, I can take the time off, knowing that I made a great effort, and look back on it with the satisfaction of a job well done, maybe checking out some pictures of the race and saying, “Yeah, wasn’t that great?”

This is different.

When this first happened, I figured it was just another one of those little nagging problems that comes and goes in a day or two. “Just a flesh wound,” I thought. “I’ll do all the usual ice and stretching and Advil and give it a rest and be back on my feet in 48 hours.”

A strong case of denial sets in when injury strikes two weeks before a big race. But as much as I denied it, the injury didn’t get any better. The Thanksgiving Day race I was planning on running passed by without me. By the following Monday, I had to cancel my plans to run the California International, and by Tuesday I was in the doctor’s office. He says it’s a pulled hamstring. It doesn’t feel like one, but then, I’m not a doctor.

The prescription is physical therapy, which I find very time consuming and quite annoying. Physical therapy usually involves answering a lot of questions like, “You’re not very flexible. Do you stretch at all? Yes? Probably not enough, though; if you had just had the decency to stretch more, this injury never would have happened [you miserable excuse for a human being, you . . .].”

I place physical therapists alongside dental hygienists when it comes to lecturing people. As it turns out, though, my PT is not all that annoying. He actually managed to get an idea of what’s going on with me and say a couple of things that make sense.

As the disappointment sets in that upcoming competition is out of the question, you start to think about what to do with all the extra time you’ll have. For me, this surprisingly turns out to be a whole lot of nothing. As a matter of fact, when I’m not running every day, I even forget to take showers, which, I have been reminded, is not good. The routine is usually run, shower, run, shower.

I’ve always pictured myself being a much more productive person when I retire from competitive running. I’ll get things done all over the place now that I’ll finally have the time and won’t be tired all the time from running 110 miles a week.

Not so for me. Not at all. I was sleeping in until I had to actually get up and go to work. Or, even worse, I was waking up at almost my usual hour but then doing nothing but starting a fire (it’s how I heat my house) and surfing the Web.

PUMPKIN PIE AND DEVIL DOGS

I don’t give my diet the usual attention, either. With nothing to train for, what’s the point in watching your diet? Pumpkin pie is one of my greatest weaknesses, and since it was the holidays, there was an ample supply around (until I got to them). I ate pumpkin pie whenever I could get my hands on it. In more recent weeks, there has been ice cream (though less tempting during cold-weather months) and one of my childhood favorites, Devil Dogs.

In between bites one day, I took my blinders off and had a look around me, as I’m prone to do every once in a while. I noted that my current world resembled a Dilbert cartoon, populated with doughy, pasty, cubicle-dwelling middle-aged men. Some of them have offices instead of cubicles, so they have that going for them, but, given the choice, I’d rather have the healthy, chiseled, cut-like-a-rock body I’ve become accustomed to carrying about over the years.

It’s enough to scare you to the nearest and most readily available means of alternative training real fast.

Fortunately, my company, small as it is, has a gym equipped with two elliptical training machines. While I’m not preaching the use of these things as a substitute for actual running, I’ve never found a machine that makes me sweat quite as much as an elliptical trainer. It’s the most bang for your buck you can get if you can’t run. The motion is somewhere between climbing stairs and cross-country skiing. The elliptical machines are comfortable, unlike exercise bikes, which my bony ass can’t take.

Ellen is convinced I’d also be good on a rowing machine—specifically, on a Concept II ergometer, for which competitions are held. While the idea of two people going at it on exercise machines doesn’t sound too exciting at first, you have to see the competition to appreciate it. Check out the concept2.com Web site for a better idea of what’s going on. For the record, after six or seven tries, my 2,000-meter time is 7:17, and I’m considered a lightweight at 160 pounds. The best in the world goes at around 5:40, but anything under 6 minutes gets the attention of the national team coach. These competitions also provide an excellent aerobic workout; maybe when I retire from running I’ll enter one of the races.

YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU’VE GOT UNTIL IT’S GONE

I’ve always been thankful for my abilities. Not just that I can run faster than most other runners but that I can run at all. But maybe it takes immobility to really appreciate how nice it is to be mobile. Three weeks into my forced break, it dawned on me that I hadn’t seen my afternoon loop in that long. My loop circles a small lake in Connecticut called Wolfe Park. I wondered what had changed on the loop since I had stopped running. Probably not much. I’ve been running there for four years, and not much has changed in all that time. But I want to see what’s going on down there anyway. Even if I can’t be a champion, I still need to get outside and see my corner of the world for at least 45 minutes a day.

When the time came that I decided to stop elliptical training and start actual running, I couldn’t manage any better than about 7:30 pace; still, it was good to be outside in December. I don’t mind temps in the 20s and 30s. I was out for about 15 minutes one morning, running around the block, when someone waiting for the bus with her kids informed me that it was “too cold to be doing that.” I guess I was supposed to say something cute back, but all I could muster was, “Whatever—” I didn’t mean to be rude, but I think this woman is one of my dear neighbors who uses me for target practice on the roads in her SUV.

HOW MUCH LONGER?

I look forward to being recovered, which is taking much longer than I expected. Down time is dull. Sometimes I wish I could sit at the top of my driveway and watch me finish one of my runs. I like to switch my routes from time to time, but I have my favorites and I pretty much do the same thing every morning—somewhere between 9.4 and 9.8. On my better days it takes me 59 minutes and change to finish it.

I’d like to sit on the wall looking down my driveway and watch me finish up all the runs I’ve ever taken. I’m guessing it would take about 20 minutes to run the whole film from the best workout I’ve ever had to my worst run ever. On at least two occasions, I’d have to watch myself get out of a car because something happened out there and I just couldn’t make it home on my own two feet. But no matter how bad the run, I always knew that a good run was coming soon enough. That’s what gets me through now, as I wait to recover: replaying my past runs and imagining all the good runs ahead.

You can check Joe’s Web site at www.joelemay.com