I tore my sole up in January.  I struggled with plantar fasciitis through spring.  I battled back against my withered fitness during the summer.  Now the fall is here, the runner’s Mecca, and by all accounts I should be back up to speed and racking up the miles and pushing up my distance and reveling in the gorgeous weather that will last a scant month or so.

But my feet are borked again.  I felt a tweak this weekend when I got in some runs in Florida, so for that reason and that reason alone (not at all because the kids were away and I was able to get some entirely uninterrupted and unmolested sleep, nope, not even a little bit because of that) I took several days off.  Yesterday evening it became impossible to put it off any further and I went for a run with the dog, and now it’s official.  They’re borked.  Both feet, no less.  I’ve got pain in my right heel not unlike the precursors to the plantar fasciitis I feel I’m finally recovering from in my left.  My left foot feels like I stepped on a sharp rock, and while my foot was tweaked upward, I hit it with a hammer.

First-world problems, I know. Boo hoo, I can’t run without this nagging pain in my feet.  Problem is, if I can’t run, I’m not going to want to do any exercise, because other exercise is only going to make me mad that I’m not running.  And if I’m not running or exercising, I’m going to start feeling sluggish.  And when I start feeling sluggish, I’m not going to be thinking as clearly for my writing nor motivated to eat any better, and it’s all going to turn into one towering nosedive that ends with my health in the crapper and my mood shattered on the rocks.

The most frustrating thing is, I don’t know what to attribute the injuries to.  On one hand I think it may be all my recent runs in my VFFs, but then I wonder why my left foot improved for so long doing almost all of my runs in them.  On the other hand, I wonder if it’s perhaps the shoes I’m wearing while I’m at school and on my feet for better than half of my workday.  On the third hand, maybe I’m just getting old and my feet are broken.

Seriously.  I’m not yet 35, is it time for parts of my body to start simply breaking down?  I know it’s a reality I’ll have to face sooner or later, but it just doesn’t seem right.  Do they have some sort of guy-in-his-thirties warranty or trade-in program?  Because I’m pretty sure the feet I have are defective.