 An unpleasant choice... ignorantly race through injury, or face reality to limit the damage? |
Once again I've made a stupid decision in training and caused myself an injury, and this time it's getting awfully close to race day.
It happened a couple of weeks ago when I had a run with a couple of hill climbs in it. Just short climbs, maybe 20 and 50 metres, with some easy rolling terrain thrown in. I'd run the same route a week or two before without any trouble, but this time I stupidly decided to push the hills a bit harder. They're only short, what could possibly go wrong? I used to run much bigger stuff, and run it hard, twice a week.
It took about a week for my feet to stop hurting after that little escapade. Not so bad, I felt OK again, so I went out and did my last bike interval session. Same session I'd been doing for several weeks without problems. But this time there must have still been a bit of latent damage in my foot. It felt fine during and after the ride, but the next morning was a different story; it hurt like hell to walk on.
It's hurt in the same place where I hurt my other foot a few weeks ago, and that came right within a few days with rest. I injured it last Wednesday and the race is this coming Sunday, which really doesn't leave very long. It's making improvements day-to-day but let's just say my training programme, what little is left of it, has gone out the window. All I'm doing now is active recovery - some gentle spinning on the bike, walking and a little bit of swimming. I probably should have done a bit more swimming as I've been making improvements to my technique which could help on race day, so a bit of practice would be useful.
So right now I'm extremely pissed off that I've probably stuffed my race. Even if it feels good on race morning it'll flare up at some stage during the day so I'll spend the whole race being paranoid about it instead of concetrating on the race. And if I get to the finish line in good shape I can guarantee I'll be struggling to walk on it the next day, and who knows what other damage I'll do. If it does flare up during the race I'll face the heartbreaking decision of whether to pull out. Knowing me I'll be too stubborn and turn this into something much worse which will take months to heal...
I guess many athletes have to deal with this at some stage but the misery-loves-company approach doesn't make it any easier to deal with after the year-of-many-injuries I've just had. Too late I realised that my run technique had been falling back into bad habits, and thinking back I think that was the cause of most of my problems. We live and we learn, I suppose. We travel down tomorrow so at least I'll have some nice scenery while I fret.
