When Did I Become A Weenie…
when it comes to pain? This morning I was supposed to ride in the Albuquerque Century. I was to be up at 5am, ride time was at 7am. I wasn’t doing a full century (100 miles), just the metric century (62.5 miles). I never made it out the door, I barely made it out of bed.
On Wednesday I began feeling a pain that was all too familiar to me. The problem was, if I was ever going to feel it again, it wasn’t supposed to be for several years. The problem (read: cyst at the end of my tailbone) had been removed in January, it was not supposed to return. It has, and I can feel it.
Earlier this week, it was merely the pain, nothing to show for it, just a nasty scar where all the prior cyst had been cut out. Last night, perhaps a small bump under the scar, and hot to the touch, it was growing. This morning, after a roughs night sleep because I couldn’t lay on my back and kept tossing and turning because every time I rolled over pain shot up my back, a larger bump.
The alarm went off at 5am and I limped over to the alarm and reset it for 6am. There was no way I could ride 65 miles, but 25, that seemed feasible. I could do that. I wanted to do that, I needed to do that, I wanted and needed to ride today, that damn bump growing at the top of my butt crack wasn’t going to stop me.
6:00am came around and my body was screaming “NO”. It hurt to walk, how was I going to sit in the saddle for at least 2 hours? The pain was making me sweaty and black out if my stride was just right. Every once and a while it would shoot up through my back, I didn’t have to be doing anything, if I stood just right the pain would head north towards my head and it’d take a couple minutes to shake off.
I went back to bed, and woke up at 8:49 in enough pain that I was crying. It was not starting off as a good day. When I stood up and let the pain begin to fade I started moving around. I could feel the bump as though it had never been cut out. I knew that I was going to have to visit the doctor this week. And then I started thinking, if something were going to cause this, what would it have been. There’s only been one common thing with the last time it started hurting (Sept - Oct 2007 which I ignored until it got infected in Jan 2008) and this time. That was cycling. That thought brought me to tears. I went out to my mom and said that if this couldn’t be fixed for good I was going to be very bummed. In Oct and this time she said the same thing. Maybe you just can’t cycle as far. I told her that wasn’t acceptable.
As the day progressed I became pissed at myself. I’m the girl that would go pierce things because I was bored, my belly button, my nipples (each of them done twice), the tragus on my left ear. I have a tattoo on the small of my back. Pain didn’t use to be a problem for me. Pain was nothing. I’d do things I shouldn’t have been doing when in pain. Now even the littlest pain kills me. I can’t handle it.
And this is when I thought of what Lance Armstrong would’ve done. He would’ve ridden because “pain is temporary, quitting is forever” I quit before I even began today. I’m such a loser, my head tells me that a pro cyclist, they would’ve cycled right through the pain. It’s not like the pain was coming from some place important where they would’ve needed to listen to it, like their knees or feet or somewhere on the leg in general, it’s just a shooter marble growing at the top of my butt crack. I should’ve ridden today and I didn’t. I disappoint myself. I’m pissed because my heart says this is not what an athlete is made of. I need to get back to a point where I can handle pain in mass doses and not manage it with pills.
3 Responses to “When Did I Become A Weenie…”
Leave a Reply
June 7th, 2008 at 9:22 pm
WTH, it’s BACK??? I’m so sorry
June 9th, 2008 at 5:34 pm
Hi your one of my Drop Stars- Thankyou.
Read my link to find out more then just grab your badge, and let me know when its up and ill add you to the blogroll
http://www.mummydiariesblog.com/search/label/DROP%20STARS
June 10th, 2008 at 1:59 pm
[...] lying belly down on the bed thing (my mind screaming from the pain) as the doctor looks at my golf ball that I’m growing, saying, yeah, that’s not good, but we can’t lance it because if we do the infection [...]