Well... I am injured and have missed a sizable chunk of training. I came back from essentially 2 months off of running due to a backpacking trip and admittingly was not training smart at all upon my return. Heres a breakdown of my initial mistakes:
5k race
+Running up & down a mountain (saddleback, 16 miles)
+Reintroducing barefoot running with very poor timing
(all within 3 days)
= Foot pain.
The foot pain was mild but it was there whenever I ran, so I replaced some running with bicycling.
It was working.
Then I crashed the bicycle into a chain that was locked across a trail I always hopped on to ride to work. It was totally stupid of me. I rode straight into a stationary object, but this was an un-gated and un-lockable passageway so I never had thought to be particularly careful when going through. But I had a routine and one day that routine's knee was hyper-extended and dangling painfully from a chain locked between two posts.
So my left knee took the brunt of the force and right when it happened, I really thought something was broken or my knee was literally bent backwards. Luckily that wasn't the case. But it definitely hurt.
Over the next few days I limped pretty badly but wasn't in much pain unless I straightened my leg too much so I went to work anyway. Working on my feet and walking around helped keep my muscles from becoming extremely tight and immobile. Over a few days I got a lot of mobility back which I thought was really encouraging because I was fairly clueless as to how long term this injury would be. Those few days became a week and I no longer was seeing further improvement. During the second week of no running or cross training and doing only some icing (and pull-ups), I could walk without pain and ran for 3 minutes after a 5 minute elliptical warm up at a gym that I kind of snuck into :)
Those 3 minutes turned to a 9 minute mile and a couple days later I was hiking up Mt Baldy.
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| View down a ski-slope section Andrew and Mark took on the way up. That's one way to do it! |
I had a small group planning to run Mt Baldy on this particular weekend and I knew I wouldn't be able to do it once the crash happened, but it turned out that I could walk with no pain at all and I could run up to 15 minutes without much discomfort so I figured I'd just walk most of it. I'm very glad I did it, it was awesome but certainly took a bit longer than the time in 2011 when I raced (pretty decently I might add) up it. I ended up hiking (and running parts) up most of the way with Cris and Carmille. Cris is getting ready for Angeles Crest 100 in a few weeks and I had a blast talking ultra with him and hearing his stories. Carmille and I go back a little farther so I spent most of the time just harassing her and cracking jokes-until will got to 9k or so and the conversation and pace slowed down!
It was a lot of fun and cool to get all this in and be home by about noon. I often forget how close-by awesome places are and I know I need to do a better job getting out to see them. The way down was super technical and consisted of some running but a lot of hiking too. My foot began to bother me so I slowed a bit and mostly walked the last 30 minutes or more. Hoka One One kept the foot pain away for a while but descending 3 or 4 thousand feet in a relatively short time and keeping nagging foot pain out may be too much to ask for even from the space shoes themselves.
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| The group: Cris, Mark, Myself, "Muscle" Mark, Andrew, Carmille at the top! |
The Frustration:
The foot pain that was the beginning of all of this, isn't gone. I'd like to think after the 2 weeks of no impact the minor issue going on in the foot might magically disappear. NOPE. So now I am dealing with what seems like a very slow final healing process for my knee and the addition of a fairly constant and unknown ball-of-foot pain upon applying pressure (sometimes)......
I will say that I honestly am handling this pretty well (in terms of not getting the crazies and not giving the not-working-out Irritable Eye to whoever I may run into) but don't let my calm and collected countenance fool you--- this is really frustrating and a huge bummer.
I have absolutely learned several lessons from this already, so here are a couple quick ones if you haven't already gathered a list from reading all of the above.
-Don't run races (especially at race effort) when you're not in shape for it.
-Don't run races like the above in flats that are 7 years old that you found in a bin in the garage.
-Don't run up and down a mountain the day after running the above race in the above flats.
-Don't run a half hour barefoot on grass the day after running up and down a mountain the day after running the above race in the above flats.
-Don't crash your bike.
-Commute biking is great for the world and you, but don't try and get going fast enough to get some solid cardio in when you are in a place that may put a sneaky chain across a otherwise always-open passageway.
-Hiking can actually be fun.
-Turmeric is a natural anti-inflammatory, but tastes pretty bad when you put way way too much into anything.
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