I think my body hates me.

For some reason, my body doesn't seem to want to recover from my last long run. It was 18 miles, and it was on Saturday. This is Wednesday. What the hell? Both of my IT bands (iliotibial bands) scream at me when I get out of bed in the morning. For at least a few minutes, because the IT bands go from the hip to under the knee, I walk completely stiff-legged. I look like some sort of idiotic tin soldier parading around. 

Once the bands loosen up and I can start to walk like a normal person, I notice all the other aches and pains. I randomly get "phantom pain" on the outside of my right foot, where my stress fracture was almost a year ago. Apparently these pains (which in my case just feel like dull twinges) are normal, although doctors say they don't know the cause, and I don't understand why they call them "phantom" because that basically means imaginary, and I don't think I'm imagining the sensation.

It's probably not just the long run that's hindering my body's recovery, come to think of it. I also swam on Monday and went to a class at the gym called Total Body Sculpt, which consists of many lunges, squats, various dumbbell exercises, and ab work. The extreme soreness in my right thigh, which causes me to try to put as little weight as possible on it when going down the stairs, could be attributed to the squats and lunges. The intense planks off of the bench are certainly the biggest factor behind the ab soreness that made me gasp when I tried to turn over in bed last night.

People watching me walk (or hobble) around must be wondering what I did to get myself into this condition. I want to tell them I got this way by trying to get in shape, but I doubt they'd believe that attempting to do something healthy made me look like a cripple. Yesterday, when I had to get up out of my rolling office chair, I knew I needed a lot of momentum, so I grabbed the edge of the desk and launched myself with as much force as I could muster, nearly ending up in a coworkers lap on the other side of the room (I think he secretly liked that though). Later in the day, as I was leaving work and going down a small set of two stairs, another officemate asked if I'd hurt my back. When I said, "No, why?" she told me that I'd grimaced as I stepped down. I hadn't even noticed!

I have 4.5 weeks to go till the marathon. I am begging, pleading with my body to hold out until then. And to let me run 14, 20, 12, and 8 miles in the mean time (plus shorter runs of varying distances). To appease my aching muscles, I'm downing hundreds of milligrams of motrin, rolling them with The Stick, stretching, and talking to them in soothing tones.

C'mon body. Don't fail me now!