After some days of pain following the first Beaver Creek Snowshoe race this weekend my knee if finally starting to calm down. I have been in PT all week (and all last week) and I'm lucky that the damage is to soft tissue and not anything scary like ACL or MENISCUS! Those words just frighten me. When you are experiencing pain, and you have a long race coming up it's just torture. For about three weeks I have felt like my back was up against a wall. It's depressing, and frustrating. Things were looking much better last week as I went for a 9 mile treadmill run and was in no worse shape than before I started. I was feeling pretty peppy and felt I was up for the snowshoe race. The day after I was back in significant pain, unable to walk normally. I got right into PT again, and I am now experiencing some relief.

Unfortunately time is not on my side. I have 2 and a half days until the 50 miler and I'm running out of time to heal. I know come Saturday I am going to feel much better, and I know (since I've been through it 3 times now) that if I were to start the race I would start to feel pain many tens of miles before the finish.

A decision has to be made, and I know that the right one is not to race. Being in pain is depressing enough and I would rather that it didn't linger for the next several months. There are other 50 milers out there, and there are other years.

So...Troy and I will head to Catalina for some much needed R&R. Troys parents are watching Annie and so it will be good for us to have a weekend off of parenting.

These decisions are amazingly tough. I know I will be standing on the sidelines Saturday, with tears in my eyes, feeling like the dog that got left behind.