Addicted?

Lately every time I get out of bed I feel creaky. Creaky and stiff actually. Slowly, I hobble into the hallway and creep down the stairs for my coffee.

I'm used to aches and pains; even when I was 30 I was achey and painy sometime from running; it's inevitable. But this is different. This is aches and pains combined with a sort of unsteadiness that really makes me feel rickety. Before it just hurt, now it hurts and I feel like if I'm not careful, I'm going to hurt myself even worse - just going for coffee!!

Getting my blood moving seems to loosen things up a bit. But once I stop moving and then get up; the old lady is back, creeping and rickety.



My hips hurt, my knee hurts, my shoulder hurts - I'm the personification of pain! So I take an ibuprophen. I read somewhere that Joe Bonness (old guy - great triathlete) said yes he is on drugs - 1,200 mg a day of Ibuprophen. That makes me feel better. It comes with the old triathlete territory then, this creaky, painful, ricketiness.

I'm going to be increasing my run mileage these next few weeks prepping for the Cape Henry ten miler. I'm at a whopping 17 miles a week and 600 mg of Ibuprophen. I'm sure I'll have to incrementally increase both over the next six weeks or so.

Liberal doctors will write scripts for the maximum dosage of this stuff; conservative docs will tell you that it eats up your insides, destroys your liver and kidneys and allows you to run at the risk of injuring yourself even worse. At the age of 50 I don't listen to the conservatives much anymore. Some people would say it's insane to run if you have to take pain killers to do it. Maybe...but consider the alternative...