Will was crying, as per usual, and I was bouncing on the birth ball with him trying to calm him down. I checked my twitter account while doing so and found that one of my fellow-runners had just posted a tweet saying that the 2010 Boston Marathon registration had already closed—2-1/2 months early this year.
So here I am, a crying baby on my arm, trying to convince myself that this is all just part of some really, really bad dream.
I have this recurrent dream that my teeth are falling out. It always seems so real. When I wake up, I swear that I am toothless. I sometimes run to the bathroom mirror to see if my teeth are really there or not. The dream has progressed so much that sometimes I even dream that I’m dreaming that my teeth have fallen out. It is weird I know. The dream probably means something, but I don’t know what. All I can do right now is hope that I am in the middle of a sleep-deprived dream and I will wake up disoriented and in a cold sweat and the first thing I will do is rush out to my computer and register for Boston.
Hm.
I qualified for Boston at the Indianapolis Monumental Marathon just over a year ago, and then just over a month after that, I found out I was pregnant. My first thought upon beholding the positive pregnancy test? Not of the growing life form inside me, but of the realization that I would not be able to run the Boston Marathon. My qualifying time was good for 2010 as well, so I immediately set my sights on that.
It’s my own fault for not registering in time. But still. Traditionally, registration does not close until January or February. Plus, my pelvis hasn’t even completely realigned from childbirth, and I can still barely run 3 miles at a time because it hurts too bad. I had thought I would get around to register sometime in early December. Before Christmas for sure. But not this early, not before my pelvis had realigned.
Damn.
The only good thing is that we’ll save a lot of money. It is hell of expensive to register for the Boston Marathon. Not to mention, the cost of airfare and a hotel room. Plus, Boston is the Monday after the annual physical anthropology conference, which is in Albuquerque this year. It was looking like I would have to somehow manage to fly out of Albuquerque on Saturday night or Sunday morning and go directly to Boston, doing all of that with a baby in tow. It was already stressing me out. A lot. But still. I would have done it.
I figure now that I’ve got a child, there is no way in hell I’ll ever be able to qualify for Boston again. I was in the best shape of my life when I BQ’ed last year. I’ll never have that kind of time to invest in training again, ever.
I am just so, totally, bummed out. This sucks.
2 comments:
I am so, so sorry to hear this. I know how you were looking forward to it, even if it was inconvenient for scheduling.
On a random side note, I also have recurrent dreams about my teeth falling out. In my dreams, they actually chip off bit by bit, sometimes peeling out by layer before completely disappearing. These dreams are so frequent that I actually check my teeth each morning to make sure they're all still there. Weird.
Try not to be bummed about Boston filling up - I'll bet you'll qualify again and will actually run it someday! I trained and trained for this small marathon in MD on Nov. 28 only to get a nasty cold right as I started to taper :(
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