Goodbye, overuse injuries. Hello, sleep deprivation injuries.

Injuries from over-training, I’ve had a few – strained hamstrings, wonky IT bands, stress fractures. But this is the first time I’ve had a goal race jeopardized by injuries sustained due to lack of sleep.

It was a beautiful, sunny afternoon last week, so my husband and I decided to take our baby girl for a walk along the canal. We were all feeling a little peaked, as Alex’s recent growth spurt meant we were up every two hours every night the week before – sometimes every hour, in fact. But the sunshine (and the big, ol’ coffees we obtained at Starbucks prior) promised to cure all that ailed us. It was a little warm, so I started to slide my hoodie down my shoulders to take it off and put it around my waist. And just like that -bam- I’d rolled my ankle in about the only pothole in the history of Ottawa’s obsessively-maintained canal path, failed to steady myself with my hoodie-occupied arms, and landed shoulder-first on the ground. Well, technically, both my knees and right hand took a lot of the impact, but my shoulder was the real clutch player, saving me from smashing my face right into the asphalt. (Although, of all the people ideally suited to have a concussion, the new mom waking up every two hours with a hungry baby is right up there!) Apparently, as I lay, bruised and bleeding on the ground, I managed to holler “don’t let the stroller roll into traffic!” at my startled husband…good to know I can still bark orders from the prone position!

I assessed the damage as I limped back home: Two skinned knees and the beginnings of a nasty bruise on the right knee; road rash on my hand and shoulder, and pride that might never heal if I missed race day because of a pratfall. I skipped my run that day for obvious reasons, but the next day managed to hobble my way through what should have been a 10k tempo run. (I managed 10k, but the “tempo” best resembled that of an elephant marching band.)  Thankfully, the sore spot giving me the most trouble – a tweaked right knee – was sufficiently mended by my Sunday long run that I managed to pull off  my longest training run yet – 21.1k (precisely), proof positive that I can go the distance on race day, even under less-than-ideal conditions.  And I’m now quite certain that, if I ever manage to string together more than four consecutive hours of sleep sometime before my daughter heads off to university, qualifying for Boston will be a breeze.