May 3

I was going to run a marathon. My sister-in-law and I both signed up months ago. She was planning to run in Cincinnatti, and I would have run in Newport Beach. Neither of us will run now. She has a severe hip injury that could take years to heal. I had my own drama last week, not to mention that running in the first trimester of pregnancy is likely to overheat the body and cause harm to the baby. I had heard that dropping out of a marathon plan was more common than completing the race. I was determined to be smart and patient with my training, not to back out for lack of desire, and to wake up as early as I needed to in order to get the long weekend runs in without dumping all the parenting responsibility on my husband. Yet, life intervened.

Half of me, the angry part, is tempted to run the damn thing anyway. I have a masochistic desire to put my body through as much hell as it has caused me. I still have an untouched bottle of Tylenol with codine that might have come in handy. Unfortunately, I'm not that angry and I do enjoy being able to walk.

At my husband's half-marathon 2 weeks after I stopped running, my hormones got the better of me and I cried with envy. I was so proud and inspired and disappointed that my own life had veered off in another direction. Now, I'm saddened for all the opposite reasons, wishing I still had that awkward bump and that reason to look ahead nine months. Even if I really wanted to run (if just around the block), the prospect of simply lacing up shoes now seems like an unbearable task.

So now I'm just left with the decision of whether or not to still pick up the souveneir t-shirt. What do you do when you want something so badly and then worry that you never deserved it in the first place? Not really talking about the shirt here, am I?