You might not think of running as a suspenseful activity. At the elite level, of course, there is the suspense of seeing who wins the race--be it a 100m sprint or a marathon--but, for your average runner, you might think that running is the opposite of suspenseful, i.e., predictable to the point of boredom. After all, it's just putting one foot in front of the other, over and over again.

In my two years of running, however, I have experienced lots of suspense, in several forms.

With every run, there is the suspense of finding out how your body will respond when you force it to move fast: Will your legs feel heavy or light? Will your lungs burn or will you breath easy? Will your heart behave itself or will it threaten to explode? If you start off feeling good, will the feeling last? If you start off in pain, will it ever subside? Will you feel like quitting halfway through or never stopping?

Then, there is the minor suspense of finding out whether the little decisions you made before you even started to run were the right ones: Will I be too hot in what I'm wearing? Or too cold? Should I have brought water, or did I bring enough? Or should I have brought Gatorade instead? What about gel? And so on.

These types of suspense are heightened to a fever pitch on race day, which is, of course, when the long-term suspense that has been building over weeks and weeks of training reaches its peak: Did I train too hard or not hard enough? Can I finish? Can I PR? Can I BQ?

The run, of course, will not keep you in suspense. The run will answer all your questions. You may not like the answers you get, but the suspense will be over, at least, for a little while.

Sometimes, after the run, there comes a different kind of suspense, along the lines of: Will that little twinge in my calf (or foot or ankle or knee) disappear by morning? If it doesn't, you will ask: Can I run on it or should I rest? Is that pain just normal soreness or an injury?

Then, of course, when you do run--even though you're not absolutely sure it's a good idea--you feel fine ... until the run is over. The pain, which had faded almost (but not) completely, is back and worse than before, and the suspense builds anew: Will I be OK tomorrow? Or did I just set myself back another day, another week?

This is also the time of year when you may wake up with a lump in your throat, a clogged or dripping nose, or a sensation of thickness in your lungs, and you find yourself in yet more suspense: Should I take it easy or keep running? Are my symptoms above the neck, or below it, or both? What if they are smack dab in the middle of my neck? Can I run then? Will a run make me worse or better?

These are the types of suspense that have been most on my mind lately. I tweaked my left calf while running intervals last Thursday, re-tweaked it with a premature run on Monday, and then--just as my calf began to feel better--succumbed to a virus that gave me a sore throat on Tuesday, pink eye on Wednesday, and a full-blown chest cold on Thanksgiving.

The suspense I'm in now is the worst kind and can be summed up in one question:

When can I run again?