Catherine Connors is a mother, writer and recovering academic who traded the lecture hall for the playroom and discovered that university students and preschoolers have much the same attention span. She still dips her toes into academic waters by writing the occasional scholarly article about the place of motherhood in Western philosophy, but mostly now she changes diapers and wipes noses and indulges in long reflections on whether Yo Gabba Gabba is a harbinger of the decline of western civilization. Oh, and she blogs: in addition to Bad Mother blogging at BeliefNet, she is, among other things, the author of HerBadMother.com, Managing Editor of MamaPop, moderator of Her Bad Mother’s Basement, co-founder and co-editor of WeCovet, Contributing Editor at BlogHer, and (deep breath) founder of and contributor to Canada Moms Blog. And in her spare time… oh, wait. She doesn’t have spare time. But she’s okay with that.
I didn’t run the Disney Princess Half-Marathon. I am, to put it in as few words as possible, gutted.
I fell the night before the race. I had a bad dizzy spell – a fade-to-black-and-spin dizzy spell – and fell. I was carrying Emilia at the time. She was okay. I hurt my knee. Had it only been a hurt knee, I would have persisted and run the race. But as my travel companion, Katie, pointed out, dizzy spells and long-distance running don’t mix. “I’ll stop you if you if you try to leave the hotel room to go run,” she said. “So don’t even try.”
I didn’t try. I woke at the appointed time and swallowed my frustration and disappointment and poured all my Tiarathon determination into not crying through the wee hours until the kids woke and demanded to go see Buzz Lightyear.
I’m still not sure what to say or do or think about it. I was supposed to run 100 miles for Tanner this year. That was the whole point of our road trip, sponsored and supported by GM Canada and by everyone who cared enough to put up buttons and cheer me on. I can still run those miles, I think, I hope; the year’s still young and there are plenty of runs to pursue. But I got started by failing to run a single inch in my first race, and I don’t know that I’ve ever been this disappointed in myself in my entire life.
posted March 9, 2010 at 2:44 pm
I can only imagine how disappointed and shamed you must feel. You had set a huge goal for yourself, something you really believed in, and had a lot of emotions riding on it.
However, you did not *fail*, any more than it would have been failure to get hit by a car the night before the race, or even to have a crippling injury half-way though. Let’s turn it around a little: how would you treat one of your children if they were to ill to play in a competitive sport? now, how are you treating yourself?
You showed up. You did the very best that your body was capable of doing in that moment — and as disappointing as “not running” must be, you shouldn’t beat yourself up too much for those limitations. The person you have hurt the most in this is yourself, and you should consider being a little more gentle here. You will run again!
posted March 9, 2010 at 11:53 pm
Catherine – I’m so sorry. Sorry that you fell, that you weren’t able to run, and most of all that Tanner is so sick. My thoughts are with you, and I hope that you can see you already did the important part, which was to bring light to Tanner and others with the same dystrophy, to make people know that research is needed for a cure.