Well, my season is probably over.  Hip essentially died on today's run.  Ran a lot of uphill (most of the way up city creek from my apartment) and it felt irritated but consistent.  Within a mile of downhill, it was done, except that I was 5.5 miles from home.  Definitely walked a fair amount on the way back and the running was borderline excruciating.  Yes, it was a poor choice to go out and try 13 miles today, but in reality, it didn't matter.  My season was trashed before I laced up my shoes today.  The damage had already been done and today just confirmed the problem.  Utah Valley is almost definitely out of the picture, even if I feel healthy, just for the main reason that I need to rehab this properly and get it behind me before I risk additional damage.

As a scientist, I'm not the type of person that attributes any explanations of dreams or subconscious feeling to the supernatural - in fact, I find such reasoning to be illogical and irresponsible.  However, I do think that dreams are a good reflection of the needs and status of the human body, even in allegorical form.  The human brain has an extremely good capacity to understand its body's state on a subconscious level, with this understanding sometimes showing up in dreams.  Ever since last summer, I've had a bit of uneasiness about this hip thing and have kind of just always sensed that it probably wasn't 100% better, even when it wouldn't bug me for months at a time under a heavy training load.  The thought crossed my mind a few times that I might be building my fitness on a poor foundation, which could crumble at any point.  Just a few nights ago, right after sensing just a light bit of tightness in my right hip, glute, and back, I had a dream about selling a house.  I had built the house myself in my dream, but just when I was about to start displaying it for sale, I realized that I had built it on a poor foundation and it was starting to crumble.  At the end of the day, all my hard work went to waste when I had to tear it down and build it again.  I woke up and realized that this directly paralleled my current running state.  I've put a lot of smart training and careful building into my fitness and wouldn't change anything I've done over the last 2 months, but I built everything on a weak foundation.  That has come back to haunt me and now I have no choice but to fix the foundation and re-build from there, even though I was just about to be ready to display my fitness at the Utah Valley Marathon.  It is quite remarkable that the human body has reached the point in which our brains have this sort of intuition.   I have come to trust mine in most non-running scenarios, and the time has come for me to apply that same logic to my running.  I might not want to listen to it, but I know that it is correct.  Intuition kept all of my ancestors alive for long enough to keep our lineage going over countless milennia, and it's about time that I start trusting my intuition and doing the right thing for my body, even if it means sacrificing what could be a huge PR and having to completely rebuild.  In reality, I don't even really have a choice, as continuing to train hard at this point would likely leave me severely injured and unable to race well at any point in the near to relatively distant future.

The unfortunate reality with running is that we, as runners, have the tendency to try to push ourselves through injuries and many of us can greatly decrease our long term potential by causing serious and lasting damage, going against our intuition with the desire of rapid and potentially unrealistic improvement.  I aim to not let this happen to me in this situation.  I'm going to be smart, listen to my body, and rehab this properly.  I'll probably still try to get my sports med doctor to give me a shot of cortisone (he's not a fan of this) to keep the inflammation and pain at bay while rehabbing it, but I'm not going to enter a state of heavy training again until I'm confident that I will not be likely to have another flare-up of this injury.

The desire to train intelligently and reach the next level has never been higher for me than it currently is.  While it is frustrating to have this desire and be unable to act on it, I will let this continue to build until I am ready to train hard again, at which point I will focus all of my intensity and energy into finally running the sort of marathon that I feel capable of running.