As a runner, I am devastated when I am sidelined by an injury or a sickness, so you can imagine what I go through when faced with a difficult decision to pull myself from a race. That is what I went through for weeks concerning the Around the Bay 30k. I signed up for it months ago and was very excited to run this event for the first time. I have heard such amazing things about it and I decided that if there was going to be a race to change my ‘no training in the dead of winter’ rule, it would be this one. Training started great.  No matter how cold it was, I was bundled up and out there doing what I could, even though it was hard on the ego to slow down. Then I got sick, just a cold I thought. It would go away, and then come back and so on and so on. Then I started to sound like Kathleen Turner and I knew it was time to see the doctor because no matter how much over the counter stuff I was popping, it was not going away. Within minutes I was diagnosed with a sinus infection. Awesome. Four weeks after that first sniffle I find out that I need antibiotics to get me back to training, and then after five days after that I was finally feeling better.

I was in knots over the condition I would be in come March 30^th. I knew that I could probably just run it -yeah no biggie, it’s only 30k – which is awesome to say and makes me proud of how my running has strengthened over the past few years, but who knew how I would feel afterwards?  With a couple of spring races coming up in the following weeks, I wanted to be at my best. It was a very difficult decision, but when I finally decided to sell my race bib I felt like a weight had been lifted and I knew that it was the smartest decision to make. I sold my entry not long after that and turned my focus back to training smarter for the rest of my race season.

I won’t be lining up with my runner friends on the 30^th, but I will be sending them speedy thoughts! I am looking forward to rest of my season being healthy and strong.

Have you ever had to make the difficult decision not to run a race? How did you deal with it?