As is often the case it has been awhile since I wrote here. It has been an interesting month or so of running or not running as the case might be.
At the start of the month I found myself taking several rest days in a row. Between laziness, weather and music I ended up not running for 12 days straight. I was surprised to discover it had been so long, I had figured it was 5-6 days at most a week. But the diary reveals all. So after a few false starts, I managed to go beyond just thinking about running and actually doing it. My first day back was a little rough but not that bad. I was slow and feeling sluggish, but I managed to push myself through it at a reasonable pace. The following day I got back on the horse and found myself running a pace close to 10 min miles, actually just over. I had initially intended to try to do four days in a row to get back into running form, but I ended up taking a day off before running back to back a second time. The second pair of runs was a lot better in terms of pace, well I should say the first one was, cause right at the start of the second run I…
Rolled my ankle.
It was pretty dumb actually. There were two cars coming towards me in the street. I was running on the asphalt to make life easier on my knees and staying close to the edge of the road to allow the cars to easily get by me. All of a sudden the front car stopped in the middle of the road. I kept an eye on them to see if they were upset I was running in their street or if they were just being a crappy driver, neither option was all that great. So distracted I managed to step right into a pothole and down I went. As soon as I face planted both cars sped away, it was weird. Not even a rolled down window to ask if I was ok or even to laugh at me. I tried to walk it off and decided I had better end my run (I hadn’t even gone a mile) so I turned around and headed home. About a block later the pain subsided and I foolishly decided I could finish my run. And I did without any problems or pain though I was a little gimpy. Pretty quickly after I stopped running my ankle swelled up nice and big. I strapped on an ankle brace and headed to band practice. I got around fine but by the time I came home and got the brace off my ankle was pretty angry, swollen and hot. The brace was a far infra-red brace that might have been partly responsible for the heat as that is what they are supposed to do (somehow, I don’t actually get it…) The next night I played a Go-Go show and though I didn’t dance, I was up and about on it until 4 in the morning, again swollen! For the next couple of days I took it easy and even though I really wanted to run I didn’t. But today, I couldn’t hold back any longer and I did…
A quick return to running.
This morning my ankle seemed quite a bit less swollen. The weird thing over the last couple of days is I had very little pain in my ankle. The swelling was occurring on the outside of my left ankle. IIRC my usual ankle problem area has been on the inside of my right ankle, which is my shorter leg (I’d always partly blamed the shortness on my past ankle sprains.) But this was on the outside of the ankle and didn’t really hurt to boot. I had found myself running after the dog in the front yard without even realizing it on several occasions. So I figured I could try a short run today to get back into things (once again). Well the short run started out really well, no pain or discomfort at all, so I extended it into a base run of 6.2 miles and it felt great. I didn’t push the pace so no major success on that end, but just running again so quickly and pain free after the roll was a success all on its own. And now after as I type I feel no extra pain or swelling.