Training log: Week 4

This is literally the easiest training log post to write ever. Mostly because I can count on one hand how many miles I ran this week….five. Five miles. My ankle disturbingly swelled up to the size of a decent A cup on Monday, and after taking a short jog of a couple miles in my PE class I realized that my body wanted a rest day (the falling off the bike indecent didn’t help things). Then on Tuesday I woke up to a nice B cup on the side of my left ankle and the inability to walk correctly. Whoops! There goes running anything for the week. I have managed to get the swelling down to basically a light puffiness with some good old RICE-ing, but running hasn’t happened.

So what is going on with the ankle? I have exactly zero idea. I guess I could go to my orthopedist that I see waaaaay too much to be comfortable with, but I know that he is just going to tell me to do exactly what I am doing now. Rest and take it easy. I don’t think it is a stress fracture at all. After my experience last year with one last year, and then a stress reaction earlier this year, I have determined  the evil feeling on a bone problem. Also I have found with bone issues there is less swelling. I am pretty sure I have aggravated a tendon or ligament with my funky gait I was doing while my hip was wonky (imagine that, its all better now), and maybe the fall was just the last nail in the coffin. IT only hurts when I am pushing off in my stride on that foot which to me means a ligament thing since I can bare weight totally fine.

So to sum up, instead of running I have just been doing some intense cross training. I am determined to use my rest from running to focus on getting myself evened up and aligned correctly, which means that I have been doing a lot of weight training (something I hate and neglect). I have also been using the elliptical and cycling to keep the cardio going. I know neither are exactly like running but at least I am keeping my overall fitness level up. Yes, I am being careful and not doing anything that causes pain or seems to aggravate things. I know that over the course of a week I have gone from barely being able to walk correctly, to now being able to do box jumps and one legged squats without any pain. Good progress?

So what does this mean about my training as a whole? Well I don’t really know. I know that until I am running again I wont know just how far behind this puts me. As long as I am running by the end of the week I think I will be fine. Maybe not as speedy as I wanted to be, but at least hit my current normal marathon time. Now if I need another week of rest? That’s when things get stressed and scary. I am running Chicago no matter what this year, and I am capable of running it at an easy pace just to enjoy it even with a very short training cycle.

I guess the most frustrating thing is that I don’t understand why my body seems to throw these little hiccups into my plans all the time. I wouldn’t say I am injury prone, because I do take really good care of my body. I don’t know if maybe I should lose an easy day of running and instead use it to cross train and give my legs another day to recover, or if two workouts a week is just a little too much to ask. I don’t think that is what caused it because I was sticking to the same training plan earlier in the year with no problems. Really the fall that messed up my hip was the catalyst of all of this so maybe I just need to chalk it up to bad luck that never left me? Either way I have a couple days of cross training and then I intend to have a make or break run on it and see what happens. I just know that I am sick of running in pain, and running slow because my body can’t keep up. I love running and I don’t want pushing through theses injuries to continue to ruin it for me. My body needs to cooperate so that we can do more fun things together though because the elliptical is the most demon spawn torture device I can think of…