My friend Fred described how he felt finishing the marathon last Sunday, how he hit the wall around mile nineteen. After that, he said, you have to take it mile by mile. One trick is to dedicate miles to people as motivation to get through each one.

I feel like I hit a minor wall in the two half marathons that I’ve run. Around mile ten, I think, “Jesus, I have to run three more miles. A few years ago three miles was a goal distance. Now I have to run that just to finish this current race.” It’s a surreal feeling and I felt truly present when I had it. I am running right now. I want to stop running but in order to do that, I have to continue running.

The way I feel these days, though, is like I’ve hit a big wall, creatively and physically. I’m out of ideas and my body is telling me that it needs to rest for a while.

Writing every day has been a bit like a marathon (or what I assume a marathon is like as I have yet to run a full one). At first, everyone is cheering your name. I’m doing it! I’m running a marathon! Then you pass the halfway point and realize you have a lot ahead of you but you press on. Then you make your way towards the high teens and mile twenty and you think, “This is what mental toughness is. Mind over matter. I am going to keep going.” But I imagine you push even further past that and reach a point where you really are running on empty and you think, “Fuuuuuuck this.”

That’s where I am with my blog right now. I have wrung out every last drop of inspiration from my gray matter and I am running on mental fumes right now. (How many metaphors was that? I don’t even care.)

As for my exhausted body, let’s talk about the MRI I had yesterday. I guess, technically I had an arthrogram. I went to Union Square and went into an office below street level which didn’t exactly freak me out but I didn’t care for it. There’s something about descending to have a procedure  that seems a little – I don’t know, not sketchy, per se, but more like classified government lab-y.

So, I’m filling out the paperwork, nothing too crazy, emergency contact, current medications, any past surgeries, do you have any metal in your body, etc. But then I get to the forms about the dye they’re going to inject into me and the risk involved and there were like four or five of those forms.

This is, like, routine, right? They’re just covering their asses here? I mean, the chances of infection or allergic reaction are, like, one in tens of thousand right, not, like, one in five?

I spoke to the technician, Walt. He was cool and he put me at ease. But he said something that I didn’t know was going to happen. “We’re going to inject the dye into the joint,” he said.

Uh, into the joint? I’m no doctor but my hip joint is, like, kinda deep under the skin, right? And to inject dye into it, I imagine one will have to use a somewhat long needle?

Here’s what I know: lidocaine is awesome and “you’re going to feel some pressure” is doctor speak for “I’m putting something in you.”

Then I had an MRI, which is basically like taking a nap in a coffin in the engine room of an aircraft carrier.

Not so bad all things considered but I was kind of knocked out when I got back to work. Then I went to therapy to discuss why exactly it is I have to freak out whenever anything is even slightly physically wrong with me.

Then I was off to Astoria to do Pop Quiz Stories at QED where I totally ate it (as I said, I am creatively spent).

There’s comfort in knowing that there’s always going to be something with me. I’ll worry about it, obsess over it, and then get past it and move on to the next thing. It’s just kind of how I am.

But it’s also exhausting living in my own head sometimes.