I'd Rather Be Running

I spoke too soon.  Or maybe I celebrated too soon.

After finally getting my left ankle back where it belongs, it only took about 4 days before I hit another snag.  While diligently pounding out 9 miles on the treadmill last Sunday, I started to feel a little twinge in my right ankle around mile 5.  It's not unusual to get a little twinge in a joint here or there while running and it usually goes away after a mile or two when I get distracted by something else.  Except this time, it didn't go away.  It got worse.  At some point, I should have exercised some kind of rational common sense on the order of, "if it hurts when you do that, then stop doing it."

But I didn't.

And by the time I'd finished my 9 miles, I nearly had to crawl out of the gym to my car.  By bedtime, I'd enlisted the help of my uncle's marble-handled cane which had been left to me after he passed away a few years back.  I may have been a fool in pain, but I looked rather dapper hobbling around the house.

I took two days in a row of near total rest (which had me climbing the walls.)  On the third day, I tried biking, which wasn't bad.  On the fourth day, I took a stab at an easy jog on the treadmill which lasted all of 15 minutes before I was crying uncle and looking for that cane again.  5 days later and I'm still stepping lightly everywhere I go.

I still don't know what happened.  Best I can tell, I tweaked a tendon or two causing what the vet referred to as "soft tissue damage" when my dog had a similar injury.  I haven't consulted the vet about my own injury, although I'm tempted to since the human doc couldn't get me in until Thursday.  My sister offered the kind counsel, "hey that kind of stuff comes with the territory of being 40, get used to it."  I used to like her.

The good news is I've been logging a lot of miles because the one glimmer of light in my predicament is that pedaling doesn't hurt and I can cover a lot more miles in an hour on a bike than I can on my two feet alone.  So, I'm using this time to try to get a little bit ahead on that 7+ miles per day average I need to maintain to complete this challenge. 

But, at the end of the day, I'm still going a little bit bat-crazy, because I'd really rather be running.

Here's the tally.

Days 105-112, December 30-January 6
10 miles running and 63 miles riding
577 miles completed to date; 822 miles to go