On Taking a Break…

On Taking a Break…

It’s difficult to take a break after you’ve been training for a whole year or at least six to nine months. You feel a sense of loss. You’re not sure what to do with yourself. That’s what happened to me…

I had a cracked molar. My dentist never told me that after a root canal you needed a crown. So, I didn’t get one and my tooth being in a weak state, chipped. I went to the dentist and found that it was actually fractured, not just chipped. “I hate to say this,” my dentist told me, “but you’re going to need an extraction and implant.”

I didn’t comprehend what he was saying. I’ve had teeth pulled when I was in my teens. How bad could it be?

He recommended someone but he was far from where my new home was located so I looked up periodontists on the internet. I looked for those with high ratings only. I found one in Wantagh. He was a young guy and I had a good feeling about him. You got to go by that right?

Anyway, I had the extraction and then at the same time, he put in an implant. “Don’t run for three days,” he told me.

I didn’t run. I biked and I swam. Within a week, the tooth became infected and I developed a “dry socket.” I had never felt pain like that. It felt as though my jaw had cracked in half. I ran on my scheduled Saturday run and it bothered me but I continued to keep going.

“You swam?” he said to me when I went into the office a couple of days later.

“You never told me not to swim!” I said. He told me that swimming was the worst for mouth issues because of the bacteria in the water. “And, you really shouldn’t bike or run either. You’re not like normal people. You take things to the extreme,” he said. I didn’t really feel that way, but I wasn’t going to fight with him about it.

So, I stopped. I’m not running. I’m not cycling and I’m not swimming. And you know what? All I keep thinking about is running, swimming and cycling. I can’t wait to get back to it.

Tell me if you ever experienced a time when you couldn’t train. What did you do?