“Is writers’ block really a thing?”

It was my dental hygienist asking, moments before he put the sharp, shiny tools in my mouth and moments after he asked me what I do for a living. It was good I needed to think for a moment because there was some scraping going on. Some gum poking, some drool.

When my mouth was freed up again, I said, “You’re either blocked all the time or not at all.”

Deep thoughts in the dentists’ office.

What I meant was: every piece of writing takes a little bit of discomfort and then you’re in it and it flows.

Well, much of the time. Some pieces you struggle all the way through and some are so painful you have to stop.

The dentists’, a place of discomfort toward some greater good, seemed an appropriate place to bring this up.

Running is like this, too. Classic type B fun, the good part comes after you’re doing, most of the time, looking back on the discomfort you overcame to get there.

I’m supposed to be running a marathon right this minute. All summer, I trained for the Quad Cities Marathon. I did tempo runs in blazing sun and marathon pace workouts in pouring rain. I ran 20 miles three times, returning from each so soaked with sweat my husband asked after two of them, ‘did you jump in the pond?’

I worked hard, it felt awful much of the time, and I stuck to it, feeling a satisfaction after enduring physical and mental discomfort.

But on Tuesday, as I ran the last workout of the program, my ankle hurt. It had been getting more and more sore through the weeks, with every workout less like a spring and more like a block of cement. The past week, I’d been pushing it to the back of my mind and being optimistic, but with the marathon a few days away, I could not ignore the fact anymore that I couldn’t run a few more miles on this, let alone  26.

I had to make a decision: Injured.

It’s a hard word to take on and sometimes tricky. I remember leaning hard into a little pain in an ankle during high school cross country before a meet I really didn’t want to run. Could I have run a 5K that day? Probably. Was I intimidated? Yes. And instead of going through with the tough thing, I stood on the sidelines.

Now, I wonder if I’m doing the same, leaning into a little twinge to avoid a marathon that’s been intimidating me all summer like a mountain I have to scale. The decision to pull out did come with a relief that freed me up to focus on some other urgent, stressful things. But I know it’s the right thing to not be running right now. I made the right call: this is pain, not just discomfort.

I’m reading “For the Love of the Grind” by marathon great Sara Hall. A large part of a pro runner’s job, she makes clear, is telling the difference between massive discomfort that’s the essence of distance running and run-ending pain.

I wish I could run right this minute.

On Friday, instead of getting a post-marathon massage, I’ll be in the orthopedist’s office getting x-rays and hoping they can find what’s wrong.

And yesterday, instead of picking up my race number at the expo in Moline and settling in for a pre-race dinner, we took our son to The Children’s Museum, Indianapolis, a building with life-sized brachiosauruses climbing in the front windows. I’ve never seen a kid have so much fun. Type one fun – a great time all the way through.

My ankle felt so good, I wondered if I had been imagining the injury. But then chasing my kid down a ramp winding four stories through the center of the building reminded me: yeah, injured.

Not showing up makes me supremely uncomfortable. The worst part of this morning is the feeling I ought to be somewhere else (on a marathon course) and that I’m letting someone down by not being there. Instead of running right now, I’m about to go for Day Two at the dinosaur museum.

Way back at the beginning of summer, something told me to sign up for TWO marathons this fall. I’m registered for the Madison Marathon in November. My hope and goal is to heal my ankle, whatever that takes, and get ready for that one.

Because at the end of the day, I do love this game of gaming discomfort.

In the Dinosphere exhibit, my kid gravitated toward a magnetic puzzle: assemble the allosaurus skeleton. For a few minutes he and another kid struggled to put the first piece in place.

Then he said, “This is difficult, but that’s what makes it fun.”