Get On, Clip In, Fall Off

The irritation of injury

There's been a lack of blethering about running here for the last couple of weeks. The reason for this is that I haven't been actually doing any due to what's rather grandly termed "injury", and had to wait until I could, say, walk downstairs without stabbing pains in the back of my right calf.

What happened? As far as I can tell it was a classic case of hubris. It's a well-known thing that runners who push too hard and too fast run a serious risk of getting injured in their second or third month of running, and this happened almost two months to the day after I started running. On the Monday, I'd done quite a hard and fast run, much harder than my usual fairly relaxed five-minute kilometres. The next morning I noticed pain in my right calf and knee, so took that day and the next day off to give them a chance to recover. In my head I couldn't get away from the fact that I'd already entered the Serpentine Last Friday 5k which was coming up in two days, so made myself go out for a run on the Thursday despite still being in pain.

And oh, it was horrible stuff. Uncoordinated, painful staggering with my feet killing me and at least two stops needed on the outbound leg, clearing up somewhat as I turned for home but still mostly kept going through sheer willpower rather than enjoyment as there, well, wasn't any enjoyment.

The next morning, after lots of vacillating between "look, running would be stupid" and "but I've entered already!" I finally gave in and decided to run. I set myself the target of getting round without collapsing, showed up at the start and nervously set off. Gritted teeth, willpower and finding a couple of other runners to pace myself behind got me around the course, though it was absolutely no fun at all. To my surprise I finished 166th in 22:48, which considering that given my condition I'd have been delighted with 25 minutes was pretty good. It was a painful and unpleasant affair, though, and not the kind of run I want to make a habit of as if they were all like that then, well, I'd probably take up knitting instead.

Of course, the next morning my body was telling me how stupid I'd been, and I finally came to my senses and obeyed the first rule of injury assessment - stop running. After a few days the pain became a bit more focused and I came to the conclusion after consulting the books that I'd probably done some fairly minor damage to my achilles tendon as the symptoms and the circumstances matched perfectly. Minor it may have been (serious achilles tendon damage is, by all accounts, agonising), but all I could really do was wait it out while cursing my own stupidity for running on an injury and aggravating it further.

Over the last couple of days the pain finally went away, leaving just the odd twinge, and after not having any trouble today I finally decided that maybe I'd be able to go on my first run in over a fortnight. After getting changed and procrastinating for a long time through nervousness I took a deep breath and headed out of the door and found that hallelujah, I can still run! I could, in fact, still run strongly and at a good pace and had few problems other than a few aches and pains which I used to get when I'd just started running reminding me that they were still there. I'd also overdressed a bit - thermal T-shirt and long running tights - so was uncomfortably hot, despite the fact that many others seemed to be wearing fleece jackets and tracksuit bottoms and hats and such. I can only assume that I'm cold-blooded compared with most people.

By and large, though, it felt fine - some minor twinges afterwards, but not worse than those produced by the average run, and as my brain thought "Ah! I remember this!" it gave me an extra big dose of endorphins which probably helped a bit. It's definitely good to be - hopefully - back, albeit having learned a fairly important lesson in the process. Going to have to take it easy and be careful for the next couple of weeks, but at least it's now less likely that my entry to the Hog's Back next month will be wasted.

Posted by mpk at November 15, 2004 11:04 PM | TrackBack