Has anyone every faked a groin injury?

Has anyone every faked a groin injury?

I did just one week before the 2000 Boston Marathon. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to run or was intimidated by “Heartbreak Hill”. I simply had no choice.

Both my wife and I qualified that year and were looking forward to a fun trip with about ten other folks from our running group in Irvine (Southern California). It was supposed to be my first Boston and my wife’s second. Her first coming four years earlier when I was living in Switzerland and she was in graduate school in Florida. I flew out for that one and swore that one day I’d get fast enough to qualify myself.

Two weeks before we were scheduled to leave for Boston we got the BEST possible news – Dee (my wife) found out she was pregnant! When I got home from work that day she gave me a little card with the fantastic news. I nearly fell over! As she was just over a week pregnant, and far from the point where you start telling people – one of our first thoughts (after how we were going to pay for the baby’s college education) was “what are we going to do about Boston?”. How do we not tell people she’s pregnant and still run the race?

The first step was to make sure she could actually run the marathon safely. We consulted with several experts and the consensus was that there was no risk so long as we took it easy, drank lots of water, and stopped every so often to take Dee’s temperature (we wouldn’t want the litte bugger baking in there – a slow simmer maybe).

As race day approached, we decided that we would run the entire race together at roughly a 4 hour pace. That was an hour over my qualifying time and a good 40 minutes slower than my wife was (and still is) capable of. Of course, when you’re travelling with ten people who you run with regularly and know what you’re capable of, how do you explain dogging the granddaddy of all races? Enter: Groin injury. I’m not sure who came up with the idea, but it was brilliant (it was probably my idea). Nobody questions a groin pull. To take the focus off Dee, it was decided that I would be the walking wounded .

With a week to go before race day, we slowly started planting the seeds of our deception. We broke the news that I had been injured on a training run to a few people on our trip. Then, to make it more believable, I starting favoring my right side.

Once in Boston, the people we were with had totally bought in to the story that I was just going to get through race day somehow and Dee (my lovely wife) was going to run with me to show her support.

By race morning, all the limping around on my ride side had actually aggravated something on my left leg. It was all I could do to keep from shifting my limp to the other side.

I’m not going to go in to the race itself. Those of you who have run Boston know what a magical day it is. We crossed the line in 4:01 and our chip time bought us another few minutes.

Several weeks later we broke the news to our parents at our favorite pizza place and on December 23rd, 2000, our son Caden was welcomed to the world – having run his first (and hopefully not last) marathon with his parents just 9 months prior. He’s been running ever since!