The most cursed runner we've ever met

Marc ran the muggy but flat 2011 Houston Marathon this past Sunday morning, coming in 12th overall in 2:25:29. I was unable to join Marc in Houston, but thanks to modern technology, I watched him cross the finish line via the race’s finish line webcam – gotta love the internet! This is a middle-of-the- road time for Marc, but he realized 10K into the race (going at 5:17 pace) that he wasn’t going to be able to met his goal of 2:19 and wisely slowed to a 5:30-5:35 pace the rest of the way. This is all good, because it means he’s not torn up from Houston and is now planning to run another spring marathon (probably in March).

Anyway, back to why this blog is titled as such. While Marc was in Houston, he bummed into another sub-elite runner (aka: NN, for the sake of privacy) who we had met in a number of other races years ago (including the Olympics Trials in Nov 2007). NN used to be a doctoral student at Duke and is your typical type A “want-to-be-perfect-in-everything” guy, who is super intense and borderline psychotic in my option. Apparently, while training for the Olympics Trials, he ran up to 120 miles/week, and ended up with a pretty major stress fracture on one foot 2 weeks before the trials. Still, he ran in the trials and (I think) ended up dropping out halfway through in much pain & agony – I recall seeing him during the race grimacing and running with a very strange gait for at least 2 laps around Central Park, each time dropping further and further back. Up till this day, Marc & I still have no idea why he even ran in it given his condition! We concluded he was nuts and did not see him at any races (local or not) since.

So when Marc told me he bummed into NN at Houston I was curious as to what he had been up to. The low-down was that after his foot finally recovered in 2008, he ruptured his Archilles tendon and was out again for a while. Then (probably because he tried running too much again before fully recovering), he tore a calf muscle on this other leg. Consequently, poor NN was pretty much of the competitive running scene for almost 2 years. Meanwhile, he completed his PhD and got a job in Houston. Only in the last few months has he started training seriously again. Ok, so a bout of bad injuries --- probably due to him being too impatient to let his body recover and over compensation issues. All of this wasn’t too much of a surprise to me, given his track record of somewhat rash decisions.

But what happened to him this past weekend took the cake.

NN was signed up to race in the US half marathon national championship, which was held the day before the Houston marathon & half marathon but organized in conjunction with those events. Friday evening, he goes to pick up his race packet and learns that because he's from Houston, the organizers had thought there was a mistake in his registration and had moved him (without telling him!) to the Sunday's half marathon instead of Saturday's championship. Because they had not printed his bib number for the Saturday race, the organizers could not correct their mistake! To make matters worse, it turned out that the weather in Houston on Saturday was perfect for a race -- in the low-mid 50s, not too muggy, way better than Sunday. So poor NN was relegated to Sunday's race.... to be honest, if I had been in his shoes I would have gotten to pissed off I would not have even raced on Sunday and demanded a full refund. But any rate, NN showed up on Sunday and race in the rain (which was really quite magnanimous on his part, I thought). Apparently he fell twice (!) during the race, and when Marc saw him after the race he had scraps all over his chest from is full frontal spill about 7 miles into the race. Man... it was just one thing after another for him.

I have never heard of someone with such a terrible combination of injuries and pure bad luck! Admittedly, I felt a sense of schadenfreude when I heard what had happened to NN. Both Marc & I were grateful neither of us have ever had anything so terrible happen to us! And the rest of you runners out there, be thankful for all your near missed falls, remember to take advice from friends who tell you to rest when you need to and it's OK to be obsessive about checking your race registrations!