Marathon pain comparison

I'm not gonna lie - running a marathon is not a pleasant experience.

I've only made it round one, and it was horrible.

But, the ever-soothing passage of time helps erase these painful memories and allows you to convince yourself that it wasn't actually that bad, so why not give it another go?

That is why I tell people that whilst pretty much anyone can do a marathon with proper preparation, they shouldn't.

My thoughts drifted to this topic the other day as I contemplated the symphony of suffering I'd somehow composed for myself.

The dull, monotonous pain of the ceaselessly aching ribs I cracked underlining the ebb and flow of pain from the tooth now ripped from it's mandibular home. All this abbreviated with the occasional crescendo from the now absent distal phalanx from my left index finger as I forget it isn't fully healed and stub it on a range of one of the previously unrecognised obstacles that litter my life.

These musings - quite naturally I'm sure you'll agree - made me think that I needed to draw a graph comparing the different pains over time.

Obviously, for it to stand up to any kind of scientific rigour, you need to set some kind of parameters, so I've gone for a simple 0-10 scale for pain (with 0 being least and 10 being most).

Time is measured on a 0-20 scale, with 0 being the time the incident happened. But, 1 unit isn't necessarily a day. I've gone for 20 being more of an unarbitrary period of general suffering, and subdivided that.


Taking the marathon as a starting point, that hurt a lot at the time (0) and for a few days after, but subsided pretty steadily once I stopped doing stupid things like running.

Cutting my finger off with a table saw was, understandably, immediately more painful than the marathon, but that diminished rapidly and is really only an issue now when I bang it (not as uncommon as I'd like!).

The ribs were more of a bore - not as instantly painful, just diminishing less rapidly than I'd likeand pretty restrictive for things like moving and sleeping.

The tooth is all over the shop. Not the worst immediately, but ebbing and flowing over time depending on if bits are still falling out, whether I'm being operated on, or if I've bitten into something too enthusiastically and forgotten the no go area for solids in my mouth.

So, for all those people out there wondering how running a marathon compares to cutting off a finger, cracking a rib or smashing out a tooth, there's now a convenient graphical comparison.

All part of the service here at PRL Towers...

Pain is relative

Like the really annoying uncle you never want to visit

Regular readers will be giddy as a bunch of street drinkers in the Threshers sale to know I've managed not to accidentally hurt myself lately!

The key word being 'accidentally'.

I have had a minor operation to remove the remaining fragments of tooth that my ill-thought out attempt to stop myself falling from bike with my face didn't fully dislodge.

As ever, my trusty BlackBerry Storm was on hand to document the occasion.

This is my with the sexy glasses on, pre-anesthetic:


Don't know why it's so green, but I'm assuming I was shooting from inside Kermit the Frog.

This is me after they'd sliced into my gum and ripped out the root:


The white bit is the gauze I had to bite down on to stop the bleeding. Five seconds later this was pretty much solid red, and tasted warm...

This is the little blighter the dental profession were so keen to extract from it's natural place of rest:


Nice. Not at all like a maggot that has recently gorged on the inside of a rotten crow...

And this is the state of my gum:
There's just the one stitch in there, that will apprarently dissolve within two days to two weeks. I wish they'd trimmed the end a bit more as there's a dangly bit I keep playing with that's really annoying.

Sorry there weren't any of the actual yanking out, but the doctor and nurse didn't realise I was taking snaps until it was already out. They said they'd have been more than willing to take a few - gotta love the NHS!

So, I can tell you're wondering how, other than helping in my efforts to lose a bit of weight, this impacting on the training?

Not too badly really, other than time.There was a bit of excessive blood during some Sunday morning exursion, but that all seems to have calmed down now (apart from a sandwich incident yesterday lunchtime).

Also, now the ribs are less completely debilitating, I'm now able to get a few non-cycling miles under my belt. So this week will be a test of how this whole shebang has affected the running, and an indicator (for me at least) whether all the cycling has helped keep things from deteriorating into a steaming pile of uselessness.