This was perhaps the strangest year in memory for me in terms of health and fitness. On the one hand, I spent a big part of the year dealing with ongoing challenges related to a herniated disc. On the other hand, despite those challenges, I ran my first two marathons and they went smashingly well, and I also completed the longest bike rides I have ever done.
Last October, I started lifting weights as part of an effort to avoid injury, and ended up hurting myself quite badly. It turns out that single-leg Romanian dead lifts are best approached very carefully, with someone who knows what they’re doing, and at much lower weights than I used. The resulting herniated disc left me with both acute and chronic problems that affected the rest of last year and much of this year.
My plan at the start of the year was:
- Run the Denver Colfax Marathon and see what the marathon is like (my ‘A’ race for the spring).
- Participate in the Courage Classic fundraiser cycling tour, riding the long routes if possible.
- Run the Indianapolis Monumental Half Marathon event (my ‘A’ race for the fall).
- Stay at my target weight.
The injury meant that this did not quite go to plan. The target weight bit I pretty much nailed. The rest of it, well… let’s get into it.
All last winter and spring I worked on slowly healing up from the herniated disc — in part by training. My physical therapist and the orthopedic specialist I saw agreed that as long as running was helping and not hurting, I not only could but should keep doing it. Over the course of the late winter and spring, running was great, and my back issues and associated sciatica slowly improved. By March or so, I felt normal, and was turning in training runs that had me hopeful for my marathon debut. When I actually ran the race, it went better than I even hoped. I ran it only 3 seconds per mile slower than I ran the half marathon event at Colfax in 2024, and notably faster than any half marathon pace I had ever run before 2024. There’s a more detailed race report here if you want more details!
After a breather, I started working on building toward the Courage Classic fundraiser bicycle tour and my fall ‘A’ race of the Indianapolis Half Marathon. I had so much fun with Colfax that I started mulling on running the Boulderthon Marathon as a ‘B’ race. And then, the day after a slightly-too-long bike ride to celebrate my birthday — a long ride has become a tradition for me over the past few years — my back flared up badly again. This time, it turned into awful overnight sciatica that meant I was sleeping only about
I ended up taking some time off as I started getting physical burnout symptoms, and managed to ride the Courage Classic well — doing the 60 net-downhill miles of the 80-mile long on the first day (not doing the climb back up over Vail Pass, because I thought I probably could but would risk exacerbating injury) and the normal “medium” 40-ish-mile course the second day, and it felt great.
I chose at that point not to try to race the Boulderthon Marathon event in the fall, but to leave open the options of running it at an easier pace or of dropping down to the half marathon distance — either way, still aimed at Indianapolis. I started a proper half marathon training plan a week or so later, and things went pretty well for a while.
In the end, I ran the Boulderthon Marathon event, not racing it, but treating it as a very long fitness-builder workout: alternating two kilometers easy, one kilometer at marathon pace. The last few miles I was a little tired, but nothing to write home about — indeed, it was easier than many other workouts I had done. I ended up finishing at 2:54:57, averaging a 6:40/mile pace, which surprised me for how fast it was — I had gone out expecting to finish right around the 3 hour mark — but perceived exertion had felt right and heart rate agreed that I was not over-doing it.
The next week I participated in a race as a pacer for the first time, running with another guy for the lead pace group at the Colorado Springs Half Marathon. Pacing was a blast, and I definitely hope to do more of it in the future. It was really cool having folks at the end tell us that they hit their goals because we were there to run with, or to chase, or to just-barely-hang-onto at the tail end of the race. I have never run with a pacer group when racing — at first because I was just trying to find my own pacing, but then because I have been faster than any available pace groups for a long time (not bragging, just the facts), so I had never really experienced that dynamic. It was quite rewarding, and races are fun to participate in even when not racing, so I expect to do more of this!
However, in the weeks before those two races, I was getting a bunch of nagging fatigue and near-burnout symptoms again, even though I was “only” doing a (hard) training build for a half marathon. The two days after the Colorado Springs Half, I felt bad, even though the half had been one of my easier long runs in weeks, and didn’t directly leave me feeling fatigued at all. After talking with Jaimie and various other friends, and considering, I decided to pull the plug and not run Indianapolis after all. A bunch of things about my body were just indicating that I was a bit overcooked and needed to back off. “Better to stay healthy and run another year”, I thought.
This proved an extremely providential decision, albeit an ironic one.
That very next Saturday, I had to pull our ~55-pound dog away from something nasty in the yard, because her collar was off and my wife couldn’t get the dog away from it. Even though I tried to use my legs rather than my back, I ended up with a classic lift-and-twist motion, and I felt my back pop in a very bad way, and it immediately started tightening back up. I knew this was the herniated disc flaring up again. I tried to walk enough and stay mobile enough to keep it from getting worse, and for the rest of the day, it seemed like it was bad but not terrible.
It got worse, though: the next morning I rolled out of bed — literally rolled, because the pain was pretty bad when I tried to sit up at all — and then tried to carefully stretch and get up off the floor so I could go to the bathroom. The pain was so agonizing that it took me several tries over the course of a few minutes to find a way to lever myself off the floor and walk into the little water closet in our master bathroom. Once I was standing, the pain diminished a ton, which seemed like a positive sign, until I walked into the water closet and flipped on the lights and discovered that the wall was swimming in front of me. “That’s weird, doesn’t seem good…” I thought, and then then next thing I knew I was on the ground looking up at the toilet instead of down at it.
Vasovagal syncope is a reaction — sometimes an overreaction — to certain triggers. Your heart rate and blood pressure drop dramatically, and you can faint as a result. This is what happens when people pass out at the sight of blood, for example. This is why the advice is to put your head between your knees or lie down if you start feeling that way. But vasovagal syncope is also a natural response to overwhelming pain. When I stood up and the pain seemed to drop dramatically, it wasn’t because the pain was gone. It was because the reduced blood flow to my brain meant I wasn’t processing it consciously in the same way, and was indeed short on consciousness in general. I had never passed out before! It was novel! It was not fun. I would not recommend it.
I let out some loud, distressed noises, and — not yet realizing what the underlying mechanics here were — tried to get off the floor again. Jaimie came over, hearing me calling out, and I explained that I had passed out. Again, I found that straightening normally was impossible because excruciating, but that if I levered myself just so, I could get to vertical. But when I got to vertical, I was immediately extremely dizzy and saw the room starting to spin, and said, “Nope, I’m going to pass out again if I stay on my feet.” I carefully laid myself down on my back — the one position that only hurt a lot instead of unbearably, and told Jaimie we needed to call 911. Also new to me!
I ended up going to the hospital in an ambulance (also new to me!) and getting my first-ever dose of morphine to deal with the pain (also new to me!) and getting a CT scan to make sure I hadn’t fractured part of my spine, which thankfully I had not. Then, with a new prescription of steroids to help address the inflammation around the nerve and advice to cycle ibuprofen and acetaminophen, I was discharged and sent home. Since then, I have been working with a good pain management doctor, several physical therapists, and an orthopedic specialist to get healthy. I have confirmed via MRI that there is nothing else abnormal going on — just a worsened version of the same disc herniation from a year ago.
Things are all tracking the right direction, albeit more slowly than I would like. I got to the other side of horrific sciatica that followed the initial injury — I was sleeping only
And I’m doing a lot of Pilates, and expect I will be forever, as the only shot I have at not going through this and worse in the future.
To wrap this up on a more positive note, a few notes on what I learned about myself as an athlete this year —
One of the big things I took away from the combination of the two marathons was that this is what my body loves. I have known for years that I am much more of a “slow twitch”, aerobic runner than a “fast twitch”, anaerobic runner. (Even today, I have friends I am minutes per mile faster than in a long race, but who can handily outrun me over short distances.) From the start of running seriously, my body responded very quickly and effectively to aerobic training. Meanwhile, “tempo” and speed work have been difficult and the rewards from them have come very slowly. This had long made the half marathon a sweet spot for me, because it is a largely aerobic event, though one that burns an awful lot in the last few miles in particular, and that as a friend put it to me a few days ago “still feels like racing” because it has a real speed component.
What is more, shorter distances have always just been brutally painful for me, because they push into speed territory that makes my (very mild) exercise-induced asthma flare up. Everyone hurts during faster races, but the chest pain I get is awful, and it always has been. I had to have an inhaler to be functional in high school football workouts, and while I don’t need one today, I do still get that agonizing, bent-over-and-cannot-continue pain when I am pushing into those ranges today. The workouts where I am likeliest to have to “pull the plug” are those where I am running 5K pace or faster and it’s cold.
Going into this year’s training, then, I knew that I perform very well aerobically, and that my body has always responded extremely well to aerobic training, and that I have managed to use speed work well enough to turn that aerobic talent into fairly fast (for amateurs!) times in half marathons. I did not know what to expect from the experience of running a marathon by comparison. What I learned is: my body loves marathon training and racing. The whole thing felt like I had finally found what I am best-suited-for in running. A friend got a video of me running by at mile 16 of Colfax, and I was working, but I was working in a comfortable, at-ease way I have never felt in any other context, and having a blast.
I’m hopeful, looking forward, that I’ll be healthy enough to run a race hard again in the fall. In the meantime: onwards, carefully.
Notes
Counterfactuals: it’s possible I would not have gotten injured this way at all if I had not made that decision, of course. I might well have been out on a long run that morning; certainly the timing and dynamics of the issue with the dog would have been completely different. It’s also possible that the letdown from taking a few days off combined with the dog situation to cause the herniation to flare up. But it’s impossible to know, and I am not worried about it, even if I have considered it with some bemusement. ↩︎