It was not to be

My twelfth marathon was planned for 9 May, the Maas Marathon that goes from Vise in eastern Belgium, crosses the border into The Netherlands, goes into Maastricht and returns to Vise, all the way along the Meuse (hence "Maas") river banks.

It was not to be.

In the beginning of the year I received an email promoting the Antwerp marathon and 10 mile races, at the very end of which it was mentioned that on exactly the same date, i.e. 9 May, there was another marathon, in Prague. Now I've been wanting to visit this city since a long time, so I thought this would be an excellent occasion to combine my marathon with a short holiday there. Within a couple of days we had booked the hotel room and I registered and paid for the Prague marathon.

It was not to be.

Training was going well, in spite of heavy snow making training much more difficult through most of winter. I did an excellent 'Hivernales de Boitsfort 20k' in the beginning of February, but that was to be my last hurrah for a good while. A few days after that, the trouble started.

My right achilles tendon and my left hamstring began to hurt while running. The achilles was probably due to running long distances on slippery snow; the hamstring strain may have been caused by the strong effort in the 20k, combined with the snowy long runs. Whatever the reasons, I had to stop training to allow the pain to ease away. One week of rest later the pain wasn't so bad, but it hadn't gone away altogether either. I managed a couple more long runs of 2h45m each, then I caught a cold.

Actually it was a throat infection, quite nasty, that stopped me for another week, and just when it looked I was going to resume training... gastric flu, and a further week of stoppage.

Now it was clear that, with just 6 weeks to go, after so many stoppages in training it would be quite impossible to aim for a normal marathon on 9 May, and the best I could hope for was a 'very long training run' of 42.2 km, similar to my memorable 8th marathon that I ran in Brussels in 2007. Then I had a crazy idea. I would use this 'very long run' (maybe it would also count as my 12th marathon if I managed to go all the way) in preparation for a postponed marathon, which would then be my 13th, in Bruges in July. That would really be a case of turning adversity into opportunity, achieving two marathons in just two months!

Alas, it was not to be.

If there was one positive outcome in the forced stoppage due to throat infection followed by the flu, it was that my achilles tendon and the hamstring injuries had ample time to rest and recover completely. That's what I thought, so imagine how disappointed I felt, after a full two weeks without any running at all, to discover during a short 30 minute comeback run that both the achilles tendon and the hamstring were still hurting a little bit.

This morning, one week later, I've had to resign myself to the inevitable as it became clear that, far from getting any better, my thigh was hurting with every pace. Running has become a painful, rather than enjoyable, experience, and quite simply this will not do. If I want to enjoy running again I'll need to take a long break to allow enough time to recover completely from this injury.

It's a bitter disappointment for me. I was so looking forward to the Prague marathon and the joys of running in spring after the awful winter that we have just endured. For a good while, now, there isn't any target or event, to which to look forward. So I need to make one up, one that doesn't involve running, and that preferably uses up large amounts of calories...