Saturday, April 14, 2012

More Pain

Why does something I love so much (running) continually try and beat me down? I have been injured now 4 times in the last just over a year, and I have had enough!

After the 20 miler I did last weekend in conjunction with the Great Bay Half Marathon, where my arch started bothering me at mile 18, it has escalated into real pain. Monday night I tried to do my prescribed hill workout, but the pain got to be so bad on the last hill that I couldn't bear to jog the cool down and hobbled my way home. I have been taking extra good care of it since then (rolling, icing, not running) and when the next long run came (Friday due to special weekend guests!) I was terrified. For one thing it's getting super scary close to the marathon to have an injury (can I really not run for 3 weeks of taper and be able to do 26.2?) and I had already had a super stressful week with work and other things- all of which I am sure were exacerbated by this nagging injury and my worry about not hitting the last long run, or running at all! I knew that if I didn't do the long run Friday it couldn't possibly get done.

After conferring with the coach, we decided the game plan would be to do a longer brick workout in the morning with a possible 2nd workout in the afternoon. I woke up at 4 am on Friday (thanks kitties) and knitted the majority of the toe of the socks I owed one of my visitors, hit the bike, then hit the treadmill (who knew how bad the pain would be - better to be safe inside than stranded on the road!).

I tentatively started the treadmill at 6 mph and gradually increased by 0.1 mph every 10 min. I had taped and rolled before the run, and it seemed to be helping. There was virtually no pain, so I pushed to the assigned 45 min to an hour. If I didn't have to go to work, I would have pushed a little longer, because at that point, I felt good- only a slight notice of the pain that was so bad the few days before.

I emailed my coach happily saying, let's do more tonight! To which she replied do 1.5-2 hr, which felt totally doable at first. But throughout the course of the day, walking in steel toed shoes up and down stairs, in and out of the lab, it was getting worse. I hoped it was just the shoes and that when I tied up my asics, I'd be good to go.

I was wrong. The first 10 min or so were ok, with just noticeable pain, but as I progressed it got worse. I took a break at 30 min to massage it, and got back on for 20 more. At this point it hurt more significantly, so I took a bathroom break, and sat down to massage it, and ended up chatting with another girl in the gym for a little while. I should have just cut my losses and quit while I was ahead. but instead, when we stopped talking, I told myself, you can do 10 more minutes. Big mistake. It hurt at the beginning and the last minute was so painful I even considered stopping at 9:30. But, my stupid type A self continued and I was in serious pain as I hobbled (again) back to my apartment and rolled and iced and cried.

Coach told me I'll still be fine. I am kicking myself for pushing too hard. I'm upset I didn't hit my original plan of 3.5 hours.

It feels a lot better this morning. I am icing right now, and able to walk not on the outside edge of my left foot. I am going to take it easy, have an awesome weekend with some great friends, and hope that the next three weeks bring me to completing the race successfully...

4 comments:

  1. Kristen -- don't let this mess with your head. Seriously. YOu've trained well. Let your foot be a jerk for a bit - you will do well.

    Typed while I'm rolling my foot on a golf ball,
    TTT

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  2. Thanks. I'm trying very hard to baby my feet right now in an effort to thank them for all the hard training and coax them to get better in time. :)

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  3. Guess who only ran 10 miles today??? This gal!!! Took my golf ball on my run with me ... stopped and rolled FIVE times in 10 miles. Icing, rolling, resting ... gonna try and do a one hour run later today. It's a split run, it's not ideal, but I'm not going to let this bad run kill me on 5/5.

    Ugh! What a pain in the ass (in my foot). :)

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  4. oh man. I hope we recover in time!

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