Sunday was the Las Vegas Rock ‘n Roll Marathon, a race I signed up to do but unfortunately could not participate in because of my increasingly annoying Achilles injury. The last time I updated you on the status of my feet, it was the left foot giving me grief while the right Achilles was intermittently tight. Now my left foot appears to have healed but the right Achilles has gotten worse. It’s now instantly tight and stiff when I start running and is stiff in the morning when I wake up and hop out of bed (morningtendon?). At first I thought I could still manage to do the half marathon, but after realizing that I wasn’t going to post a decent time and would just end up risking further injury, I begrudgingly opted out of doing the race entirely.(Believe me, eating a $135 race entry is a tough pill to swallow. I can only imagine what it’s like to get injured when training for an Ironman and watching your $600 entry fee get flushed down the toilet.)

If you read the Great American Novel otherwise known as my Ironman Canada race report, you’ll recall how I mentioned that a couple of my toenails turned purple after the race. Here’s a picture of the initial discoloration in case you forgot: The pinky toe managed to survive, but alas, I lost Thaddeus von Middlenail. Maybe I’ve been watching too much of The Walking Dead lately, but I coped with the impending death of my toenail similar to a zombie apocalypse survivor having to deal with the fact that his loved one had become infected and was starting to turn. First, there was hope. Despite hearing from numerous people (including Running Magazine) that my purple nurple nail was dying and would fall off, I thought that maybe if I just left it alone, it would pull through. It’s like if Jas got bit by a zombie and I said, “Well, we don’t know for sure if he’ll turn. Maybe different people have different reactions…yes, I’m aware that a huge bite-sized chunk of his arm is missing.” So instead of accepting the fact that my toenail was indeed going to fall off, I masked its rapid discoloration with some nail polish. It’s akin to wrapping a scarf around my infected boyfriend and pretending that he’s now okay: After a while, though, my toe started to throb and I was distraught to discover that pushing down on the nail caused a clear liquid to ooze from underneath it. I thought to myself, “Well that’s not normal,” and resorted to covering the whole mess up with a Band-aid. Out of sight, out of mind! Zombie equivalent: The toenail eventually stopped oozing and things got quiet for a while. When I finally took the nail polish off my toes, I was surprised and a bit unsettled to see that my toenail was no longer purple, but white-ish. It was as if it tried to emulate my other healthy toenails but couldn’t quite pull it off. It looked the color of bone. That couldn’t be a good sign. Over the next couple months, the toenail went through varying degrees of looseness. Some days I’d be able to wiggle the hell out of it, while other days it’d feel more firmly planted, giving me false hope that things were finally looking up… …until one fateful night when, while Jas and I were sitting on the couch, watching TV, I halfheartedly wiggled my toenail to assess its condition, as I’ve grown accustomed to doing. To my horror, it was super loose. In fact, after a couple wiggles, I was able to successfully detach it completely on the right side and along the bottom, leaving a 1/3 attached toenail that resembled the spine of a book. Oh god, it had finally turned. I was looking at Zombie Toenail. I was devastated. The little guy was supposed to pull through, not succumb to the sickness and die! After sadly flicking my deceased toenail back and forth and thoroughly grossing my poor (non-zombie) boyfriend out,, I knew what I had to do. This bad boy needed to get removed, and the sooner the better. Since I was a nail-losin’ virgin, I didn’t know whether to take the thing off myself or to consult a professional. The problem with my toenail was that it was actually still pretty firmly attached on the one side that was left, as if it was clinging on in futile hopes that it would somehow prevail. I didn’t really feel like torture porning my own toenail out with a pair of pliers, so I asked Dr. Perry about it when I saw him for my foot...