Why me?

Since Sunday I've been miserable, depressed, angry, ungracious, teary and generally pathetic. Even though I know I am being ungracious and pathetic about this, I don't know how to deal with this without feeling like a toddler. My life fell to pieces when on a normal Sunday morning, during a normal 10k race, I injured my ankle tendons so badly that I had to bail from a race. Never did that before. I could hardly walk though and was worried if I continued to limp the 5 km to the finish, I might do more harm. My emotional response to this event though shocked me to the core. I am devastated. My wholeness as a human being is so intermingled with my ability to run. More than I even expected. I got dropped at the finish and limped to towards the finish line, hoping to see Carl, and luckily he had just arrived, after running a super race. I limped to him and started crying. Like the world was ending. I still have not actually cried myself out. I feel like I've been holding my breath for the past four days. I am not being gracious about it. I am angry. I am grieving. I am a terrible person. I went for a scan on Monday, nothing torn in the tendon but signs of achilles tendinosis and tenosynovitis of the tibialis posterior tendon. Sigh. I cannot step down, or push off basically. Icing and rest...until it's better. Immediately I feel fat, unbalanced and emotionally vulnerable.

 I do feel pretty bad about my response. Carl was so gracious when he got injured at a critical time during our Comrades training. I on the otherhand (Darryl) seem to have no capacity to deal with this in anyway other than grieving for a loss. I am most definitely not resigned to my fate, but I feel very lost. So I've been focusing on finding out about treating this, preventing it and going forward. I am still hopeful that it is only a two week outage, with gentle running to start of with, but I have no real idea. It really hurts when I step down. Which is a bit of bummer when you try to run. I have tried not to test my foot so far, but I will walk on Saturday to see how it feels.
So I am really trying to look for a way through it - MJF - I am really trying to get to acceptance.

RICE (rest-ice-compression-elevation) is the only advice the doctor gave me. I really wish there was more to it, but I think he is correct. So I am alright, not really, but I am trying to be alright. Looking back at my emotional response, I am working through the "why me syndrome" I picked up at the same time I got this injury and hopefully I can come out of this a better person. I've had to look in the mirror a bit and did not like all I saw. I am very determined and positive by nature, and generally find that with hard work I can achieve and thus have been an achiever my whole life (at work - not so much at personal things). My running helps me to cope with a lot of stress at work and it's become a bit of a safety net. So I think that was the major blow for me. I look forward to running because it heals me from work, it balances my imbalances. It's the best part of my day. SO I've learnt that:

• I run for life and running is my happy place
• I deal with work stuff when I run and it balances my mind
• I need to work on my grown-up-ness
• I need to work on my acceptance in defeat and be gracious when things go wrong