Why I'm not running

What I've been up to…..

Life has been a bit interesting the past couple months. I've had to put all my race plans on hold and restructure my daily activities to accommodate a fractured hip. On August 24th (2 days after my birthday!) I had an encounter with a car while riding my bike. Needless to say, the the car won and I ended up in urgent care. After various x-rays, MRI's, and evaluations I was diagnosed with an avulsion fracture in my left lesser trochanter (bone that connects the femur and hip). It was extremely painful to do anything beside lay on my right side. I spent the next week totally sedentary, catching up on all my movie watching and book reading. Thankfully my friend Taryn came up from Corvallis to keep me company during the first few days!

Everyone gets injured at some point and it sucks, but this injury was especially frustrating because it was out of my control. My emotions varied from sad to depressed to angry. It's one thing to take a few days easy, but it's another to be forced to bedrest. And I am NOT good at resting all day! After a few days of feeling sorry for myself I tried to focus on the positive and look forward to the future. The accident could have been a lot worse. I walked (well, not quite walked) away with only an avulsion fracture and a lot of soft tissue damage. Plus, I suddenly had more free time to do other things like:

• Visit my Family

I flew back to Minnesota to visit my family and attend a friends wedding in Wisconsin. My dad had hurt his back, so the two of us were quite the pair. My mom and I stayed in a little hotel in Bayfield, WI for a wedding. The weather was absolutely beautiful and we had a great time exploring (slowly). It was nice to get back to my roots!

Sara & Ben's Wedding

My mom and I

Lake Superior

Bayfield Marina

• Study 

All PhD students must pass comprehensive exams after completing coursework before starting the dissertation. The comprehensive exams consist of written (2 hours/ committee member) and oral (2 hours). Since I had 4 committee members, I had 8 hours of written + 2 hours of oral. Anything in the field of study is fair game for comps. Meaning, I had to study everything I knew to prepare. This took quite a bit of time! Thankfully, I am done! I passed both written and oral exams and am a doctoral candidate. Sure feels good!

• Build up my coaching website: Endurance By Stephanie

I finally started coaching! It took me some time to figure out how I wanted to format the training plans and begin. Now I have a couple clients and am off and running!

This past month I've been able to start running again! I'm still not 100% healed, but I've still been able to do some cool things:

• Watch the Flagline 50k: It was hard not to race this year, but Riley and I had a good time cheering on friends.

• Set a new course record at the Pilot Butte Challenge (8:32). I've never done the race before, so it was fun to try and get my name on the board. 

• Hike South Sister with Ian Sharman (TNF teammate) and Taryn

Taryn and I hiking up 

Morraine Lake

Taryn and I at the top

Middle & North Sister 

• Circumnavigate Mt Hood with an AWESOME group of people. It was SO beautiful! All the fall colors were out and we had a long time (43 miles in 10 hours) to enjoy them. 

Mt. Hood

Beautiful fall colors along the trail

Ramona Falls
Mike, me, Zach, Max, Ellie, & Amy

So much fun!

Taking a break for some lunch

Amy and I running above tree line

• And Finally, I had my debut back to racing! I ran Super Dave's Down & Dirty Half last Sunday. I finished second to Natalie Bak, who is a good friend and super fast runner! It wasn't my best race, but it was good to be back in the loop. I'm looking forward to the next few months!