Waiting Game

Progress in running is not something that comes in a straight line. Progress can be slow. Things change marginally. There are ups and there are downs. And when you feel things improve, you need to hold on to those gradual gains.

When you set out to train for an event, regardless of the distance, it is important to recognise that it is not about running the event tomorrow. It is about running the event in two, three or maybe even four or five months time. It can seem that the goal is unattainable, that it is so much further than you have run before, that how can you ever get there?

And then slowly, as you go through the training programme, the distances you run begin to increase or your pace gets quicker, or you get more comfortable running the same distance and progress comes. Patience is key. You are tested and you have doubts, but you can overcome them.

And currently, patience is what I am hanging on to with my recovery from injury. The good news is, so far, I am feeling the benefits of a gradual return to running once more. It is not easy, far from it, but if I keep on this trajectory then I am becoming more optimistic that soon I will be in a much better place than I was a couple of weeks ago.

Great conditions are the beach

First of all, let’s focus on the good parts (I did say that there were ups and downs). Last weekend I went back to Aberdeen parkrun at the beach for the first time this year. I went really not knowing how things would go. I had had a couple of gentle runs with my JogScotland group during the week and those had helped, but this would be a bit different. This would be a bit of a push to go a bit faster. It was a struggle but I got through it and my time of just under twenty eight minutes was really quite heartening. I had gone in hoping to do around thirty minutes. So that was the first tick in the box.

Then on Sunday I went out with friends Cara, Susan and Jeanette to attempt a 10k run around the beach area at Aberdeen. This is about as flat a route as you can get in Aberdeen and I felt it would be a good test of extending the distance back to something which, to be frank, I would have taken for granted only a couple of months ago. Again, I got through it, and at a slightly quicker pace than I had hoped for. I am so grateful to have such great running friends who helped me through it. Another tick.

Susan, Cara and Jeanette helped me round

But. On both occasions I was really struggling. My legs felt like lead. My breathing was laboured and I was finding it difficult to hold a conversation during the 10k and I was almost constantly fighting with the voice in my head telling me to stop, to rest, to give it up. Now I know I have to take it as a positive that I did not give in to the voice, but it served as an important reminder of just how hard running is, and how quickly your fitness can fade when you are not regularly getting the miles in. I also need to appreciate that after two months of disruption to my routine, I should just be grateful that I am already back up to 10k distance.

“things will improve”

I never try and sugar coat things about running. It is easy to get in all the slogans about smashing it, about crushing the distance, about knocking it out of the park. but the reality is that running is really, really hard. It truly is. And all of us who run, whether we are doing couch to 5k or running marathons recognise just how tough it is. But it also teaches you a lot about yourself and this is what I am concentrating a lot on just now. I have done this before, things will improve. I just need to have patience.

After my run on Sunday, I did feel a bit of pain in my foot. Not actually in my ankle which I hurt back in December but on the other side of my foot. Now that whole part of your body is filled with lots of tendons and bones and complicated bits so I am sure the whole thing is related, but the good news is that this eased by Tuesday and I was back at JogScotland once more.

Another good thing from this week was that I was running with the club at a very comfortable pace for me and I have combined that with running down and back to the venue where we start and finish. So both nights I have run about a 10k distance, and it is that distance and duration aspect that is also inspiring confidence. This weekend I plan to attempt to go a bit further, perhaps pushing to seven or even eight miles on Sunday. I will see how I feel.

“I am behind the curve”

With six weeks to go to the Inverness half marathon and seven weeks to go to the New York half marathon, I am behind the curve in where I would want to be in my training programme, but that is ok. The knowledge that I have run the distance many times before – both in races and in marathon training – means I know I can get there.

Running breeds resilience. The more I run, the more resilient I will become. And with resilience comes confidence. But before I get the confidence I need to focus, for now, on the patience part. The rest can wait for the moment.

Anxiety

Running has given me many things .Resilience. Fitness. Mental well being. A better understanding of myself. What I had not expected, after being injured, was that it would also make me anxious.

Don’t get me wrong, there have been plenty of times where I have felt nervous. When training and running long distances that I had not run before. Or trying to run fast. Or getting in the start pen before a big race. All of those things came with the territory. What this was about was much more subtle. Having hurt my ankle and not wrong for more than two and a half weeks, when I stepped back outside to run for the first time since my injury, I felt genuinely anxious about what lay ahead.

Would I do it again? How would my ankle hold up? Why was I going out when it was dark? Would I see all the potholes in the road? (the injury was caused by treading in a pothole) What would my fitness level be like? I am supposed to be doing a half marathon in New York in two months time, how the hell am I going to be fit for that?

The reason I was going out in the dark was that I had hoped to go for a run when my wife and I were down in Dundee for the weekend, but I am clearly so out of practice with running, while I packed my shoes, shirt and socks, I forgot to pack a pair of shorts! So without wanting to scare the local residents down there, I went out on Sunday evening after I got back home.

“I felt so worried”

When I did go out, all I did was keep looking down, attempting to spot any surface imperfections to make sure I did not stand in any of them. I was rigid, running like I had an ironing board attached to my back. To be honest, that was probably likely to make things even worse, but I could not help it. I felt so worried that my ankle was going to give way.

And then, when I realised that my ankle was holding up ok, I realised just how completely unfit I felt. I took it very easy, running at a pace well below what I would usually do, but it was grim. I only did a couple of miles, but to be frank, it felt like I had never been running before, and certainly not someone who did a marathon and a half marathon only a couple of months ago.

However, I got through it and I made it round without stopping. I need to realise that over the past two months or so, my running has been really disrupted. An ankle injury in November set me back, then having got over that, then came Covid in December, then once that was out of the way and I really felt my running was coming back, this ankle injury came along to set me back again. It is obvious that I am not going to have the same level of fitness I have had before – combined with the Christmas and New Year eating and drinking fest – so I need to be pragmatic and accept where I am just now.

The details of the first run back

The important thing for me to focus on is that I am at least on the way back. Not going to lie, I was quite down when I got back in after the Sunday night run. While I was glad I got out and got round, the lack of fitness did set me back a bit. However, I tried to focus on the positives. It was never going to be pretty was it? But at least I did it.

With that in mind, I decided it would be ok to test my ankle out a bit more, so on Tuesday night I coached the 5km group at my local JogScotland club. I actually ran down to the venue and once again realised how stiff I was, so I spent a lot of the run just trying to tell myself to relax, to focus a bit more on just chilling out and trying to enjoy it rather than being paranoid about every bump in the road. I am not saying I found it easy to do that, but at least I got through that run with a bit more of a sense that the recovery was underway.

“to push too hard, to do too much”

Now came a hard bit. Actually convincing myself that going for a run on Wednesday would be a bad idea. That might sound daft, but there is a strong temptation after an injury to push too hard, to do too much too soon and therefore risk the recovery. So I spent Wednesday busy with work and making up my mind that not going out was the right thing to do. It was.

Thursday night was another step along the way, this time leading the five mile group. So a bit further distance wise and a bit quicker. All of these runs have been about building belief, about convincing myself that things are getting better and will continue to improve. My ankle is still not 100% – I do not feel I have full mobility in it yet and I am running with a support strapping but it is so much better than I thought it was going to be when I crumpled over in a heap between Christmas and New Year.

I have also really benefited from the great people I have run with this week. Group running is such a supportive method of being active. While I enjoy running on my own, the fun, the chat, the sheer enjoyment and motivation you get when running together is hard to match. Everyone has really helped me.

So now it is about just continuing to take things steadily. I am hoping to make it to parkrun this weekend and then perhaps stepping up to around 10km distance on Sunday, but we shall see. I still have a bit of anxiety. I am not out of the woods with this injury yet, but at least I have made some positive strides. Fingers crossed that continues.

Resting

First week of the year done. This time last year I was well on my way through the Montane Virtual Spine race to run one hundred and eight miles in January. The weather was not great, but that did not matter. I was motivated. I was ready for it. This year? One week in and no runs done. But I am ok with that (if a little frustrated).

My ankle injury is preventing me from doing anything. While this week has moved on from icing and is much more about having it supported and using a compression support, there was no way I was going to take any risks and try and sneak out for a few miles. It is still too painful for that.

It would be easy to be down about the situation – and yes, there have been a few moments where I have been sat on my sofa or at my home office desk and I have cursed the pothole that put me here – but there is little point in dwelling on that. Overall I am healthy, recovered from Covid, and with rest and a bit of time I feel sure that I will be running soon enough.

The two races I have entered – Inverness and New York half marathons in the middle and end of March – are still sufficiently far away that I do not need to be overly concerned at missing training just now. Do not get me wrong, I would far rather be going out for a nice eight or nine mile run this weekend than sitting in the house, which is what I will be doing, but this is the reality of what I am facing right now.

This also brings me on to doing other stuff. Just because my ankle is sore it would not stop me doing pilates, or home HIIT workouts, or doing a resistance band class, or any of the other myriad of things I could do at home. Except for one thing. I feel like such a loon doing any of those things and absolutely hate them. Now this is no criticism of those who love all of those things – kudos to you and I totally get the benefits of doing them – it is just that they are not for me. I just really like running. If the injury persists and I really need to do something to maintain any kind of fitness then I might live to regret this paragraph, but for the moment, my sole focus is taking it easy and getting back into my running shoes.

While I cannot run at the moment, I did do a bit of coaching with my local JogScotland group this week, taking a group of runners out for a hill reps session. A lot of people in the group have signed up for the Inverness Half Marathon in March and we are organising longer runs and other sessions for them. So while I could not join them, it was great to have such a motivated bunch bashing out a session to build up their stamina.

I did what I would describe as a pyramid session. Starting off with a relatively short run part of the way up the hill (using landmarks such as a road junction, post box or bus stop), slowly increasing the distance up to the next landmark before getting them to run all the way up the hill. And then do the reverse on the way back down. Hill reps are hard, but they are a great way to get your speed up or boost stamina and you definitely feel the benefit when you run on a fairly flat track. The half in Inverness does one one large hill in it, so the work now will stand them in good stead for the big day.

At this stage, I plan to take off another week to see how my ankle recovers further. The swelling has gone right down, but there is a significant amount of bruising (I will spare you any pictures this week) around my ankle, on my shin and around my foot. I did try a few hours without my ankle support walking around the house, but it began to get quite painful so the support has been firmly on for the vast majority of the week during the day. I take it off at night.

I will confess to looking at Strava with envious eyes as I see my friends out and about getting their miles in and when the weather is nice. I sigh as I cannot take advantage and get out running to enjoy it (though to be fair when it was sleeting/snowing/raining and blowing a gale on Tuesday night, I did not miss being out quite so much). The envy is not just about the running, it is also that I am missing the camaraderie of being out with my friends, that human contact that we crave so much and have missed so much in the last couple of years. Running is not just about the fitness, it is also about the friendships.

I am hoping that by this point next week, I will be taking some tentative steps back running, though I am going to very much take it as it comes. I would rather wait another week than come back too soon and face a longer period out, particularly when I have those races to come. I have no time ambitions for them, I just want to go and enjoy them, so missing some runs right now is not the end of the world. As someone once said, everything will be alright in the end. And if it is not alright, it is not the end.

Down, but not out….

Never mind any of that New Year, New Me kind of nonsense. Unfortunately, the final days of 2021 and the first of 2022 find me in a new position. Laid up on the injured sofa once more. What with having Covid in December and now being crocked, let’s just say that they year did not end as I would have wanted, nor is it starting as I want it to continue. But we are in this for the long haul, so it is important to regard this as a blip, rather than anything else.

I was heading out for an early morning run with a friend with the injury happened. It was dark but I was running on well lit streets close to my house when I can only assume I trod in a pothole in the road which I did not see. I felt and heard a hard crunch and an excruciating pain seared through my right ankle and my foot. As I hopped to an immediate halt my first thought was that I had broken my ankle.

“I tried to gather myself and stay upright”

I felt physically winded. I did not fall over, thankfully, but I came pretty close, stumbling onto the pavement as I tried to gather myself and stay upright and off my right foot which was, by now, burning if I put any weight on it. The first thing I had to do was to call my friend to let her know I was not going to make it. I managed to do that, though the call was rather peppered with profanities, as I tried to explain what had happened while my ankle felt like it was going to leap out of my shoe, such was the throbbing.

Thankfully, I was not that far from my house, only about a quarter of a mile or so, but getting home felt about as bad as the last 10km of the Manchester Marathon. It seemed to take me ages to get back home and walking back in the door only a few minutes after leaving did rather take my wife by surprise as I struggled in the door and managed to get my shoes off.

I went to lay down on my bed, but the pain was so bad I could not lie down. It was as if someone was shooting red hot pokers of pain through my ankle and foot at this point so I had to get up. I had to adopt the RICE strategy to try and make this any better.

Rest.

Ice.

Compress.

Elevate.

Though I should also add a T to that as well.

Take painkillers. This was really, really sore.

With apologies, this was what my ankle looked like as I dug ice out of the freezer to wrap around the injury.

No, it’s not an egg….

The pain was not just coming from the ballooning ankle, it was also on the underside of my foot and around the outside of my foot as well. I did not contemplate going to hospital. By this point the initial shock was wearing off and I was resigning myself more to the fact that this was just ligament damage or a bad sprain. This is the same ankle which I twisted back in November, so perhaps it was already weakened. Whatever, this was as much as I could do for the rest of the day, save for topping up the ice every so often.

The first of many ice packs

After a day of icing, the swelling had begun to reduce, so then it was a case of moving on to using a bit of compression, so I got an ankle support and have been using that since. Given how agonising my ankle was when I went over on it, I was really expecting to have an excruciating few days, particularly when I went to bed and would have covers lying on top of it. In reality, it has not been too bad. It is sore, yes, at times, extremely so, and this will require some time before I am in any way ready to get back out running, but it is not as grim as I thought it was going to be in the immediate aftermath.

After the icing, comes the compression

I had been running each day during the week between Christmas and New Year, and had been using those runs as a way of preparing for my next training block to get prepared for the two half marathons I plan to run in March – Inverness and New York. Those plans now, clearly, are going to be on hold for a bit. It is about twelve weeks until the first of those races, so while this is less than ideal, I still fully intend to run. As I have written many times before, I now want to enjoy races for the occasions which they are, rather than necessarily bust a gut to run a fast time. This injury will likely ensure that this is definitely the case for these events.

Swelling down, but bruising up….

It would be easy to get very down at being injured – I think that is a natural reaction – but I am trying to stay positive. If I cannot run for a few weeks – hopefully just that long – then I need to simply replan my schedule around that. No point in panicking yet. I am in this for the long run (literally).

Rather than heading into the New Year full of the joys and brimming with optimism about what lies ahead, I will confess to being a bit more circumspect. Perhaps after the last couple of years we have had, that is the right approach to take. But I still have targets, goals to aim for, though I will certainly miss my running friends until I am back out there once more. One thing I do not want to do is to rush back, so while I am saying two weeks, I will take it as it comes. the last thing I want to do now is come back too soon and end up out for a longer period of time. That really would be the worst thing to do as we start 2022.