I Want to Run.

I turned 36 years old a couple of weeks ago and wrapped up my first full year as a runner.  And what do I have to show for it?   A knee injury that is healing slower than I run, twenty-two race bibs on my wall, two fewer toenails, and a desire that rivals most crack-addicts to get back out on the trails and run.  But I'm not.  Not yet.  I want to run next year, stronger and faster than I did this year, and before I can do that I've got to get healthy.  And believe me, getting healthy feels like it is killing me.  Every morning when my wife gets up at 5:30 and goes out and runs in the rain and the cold and comes home to tell me how great she feels and how fast and how far her and her running buddies ran I want to kill her.  I want to be cold and wet and sweaty and out-of-breath and sore and stinky.  I WANT TO RUN.
My wife and I took up running last fall for our own very different reasons.  Her to lose weight, she had just given birth to our third child.  And me, well because I've always wanted to run.  I tried a few times in the past, and it just never seemed to click for me.  I always knew that I could run, I just didn't.  As a matter of fact I was always telling my wife that anyone could run, even her, to which she always replied something along the lines of, but nothing quite as civil as, "Go jump in a creek."  I'm confident that the fact that we started running together this time is one of the main reasons we're both still running (or at least trying to run), even if we are becoming totally different runners.
She is a speed demon.  I mean fast, especially for a girl.  I don't mean to sound sexist, but lets face it, the running community in general is to blame for this.  It was not my idea to seperate race results into genders and age groups.  But in the last year she has morphed from the girl who couldn't run one lap around the track without complaining, into one of the top women runners in our little town.  Next year she'll probably run a sub 20 minute 5K and a 3:40 marathon.
Me, on the other hand, I just like to run, and run, and run.  I am a distance oriented runner, the longer the distance, the greater the challenge, the bigger the appeal.  I want to run farther every time I run.  Of course I want to run fast too.  Enter my knee injury. Midsummer, after I'd been running for about six months, I read an article about Scott Jurak in Runner's World, and decided in that instant that it was my Destiny to be an Ultra runner.  So, I signed up for a forty-miler in September.  A forty-miler that ran three loops around a mountain with 2500 ft. of elevation gain every lap.  So I upped my milage from about 25 (comfortable) miles per week to about 45 miles per week over the span of about a month.  I trained like that for about two months, I ran (and finished) my first Ultra, and limped away with this knee injury.
So, I'm taking a month and a half off from running, and planning on starting my new training year on New Years Day.  I'll spend the holidays on the stationary bike, watching old movies and trying not to go crazy.  I've spent this first year as a runner just running, so perhaps a little cross-training will do me good.  My running friends and every article I've ever read about training all say that cross-training is important, but so far it's been hard for me to get on a bike when I could be running.  It somehow feels like cheating.
      Who knows, maybe this injury will help me build some better training habits.  Maybe I'll end up a more rounded athlete.  Maybe I'll try a triathlon next year.  Maybe even an IronMan.  Or maybe I'll go crazy sitting on a couch listening to my wife's running stories and attack the next person who mentions running with this spoonful of cookie dough.

Todd