Well that will be the first and last time that I fail to properly warm up before and after a race! While my hamstring has recovered just fine from Saturday, the same cannot be said of my left calf muscle.
After taking Sunday off, I gave serious thought to running Monday morning. However, upon waking up, my hamstring was still not feeling 100% and my left calf muscle felt tight. Rather than run and risk making both minor injuries into moderate injuries, I took Monday off. Two days off was great because by the end of the day on Monday, my hamstring felt much better and my calf felt good. By Monday night, only my calf hurt a little. When I awoke on Tuesday morning, everything felt good so I went out.
The run was great and I felt energized. As I approached the end of my run, I wanted to hit that 3.4 mile mark I had set for myself this week. So I accelerated and was feeling great until I slowed. My left calf muscle was already tightening up and much sorer than it had been after Saturday’s race. I knew I had aggravated it with the hard running. I finished my cool down, and made the painful walk back to my apartment. I stretched gingerly to keep it from totally freezing up. By mid-day at work, however, it hurt. I had already taken 1,000 mg of ibuprofen at home, but popped an Aleve at work. That gave me some relief until I got home. I rubbed some Icy Hot on my leg, which made it feel better (although as a sidenote, that stuff smells like old person and is too greasy). By last night, it felt OK (maybe 65%). However, putting any real weight on it beyond simple walking or the like produced that familiar warning pain. As in, “OK, I’m well enough to let you walk without pain, but if you try to run on me, I’m going to explode right through your leg.”
So I went to bed hoping it would be better this morning. Good news: it feels much better…about 90% I’d say. Not so good news: I felt this way on Tuesday morning and look how that turned out. So I skipped today as well in the hope that the extra 24 hours will give my leg the time it needs to completely heal so I don’t have to worry about a nagging injury. While I don’t have a race deadline to meet anytime soon, I’ve always been of the opinion that once you’re injured, you should try to heal 100% before getting back to whatever sport or activity got your injured. By “playing hurt” you’re only guaranteeing that you’re aggravating the injury, weakening that injured part of your body over the long term, and ensuring a high probability of future injury to that area at some point down the road. This could be illustrated by a graph with two lines. One would chart your ability or effectiveness over time (A) while the other would chart the severity of the injury over time (B). As line B goes up over time, line A will go down until the two intersect. At that point, not only is it no longer advantageous to play hurt, it’s detrimental to your individual effort and the overall outcome of your team, if it’s a team activity.
In other words, if I get injured, I wait until I’m 100% and then get back into it full steam. As I sit here now in my office, my calf feels really close to 100%. I’ll be fine to run tomorrow morning and not have to worry about re-injuring myself…provided I run at a comfortable pace, which I should have done on Tuesday.
Anyway, for the majority of the run on Tuesday I ran at a great pace that felt fine. I was very happy to get my cruising speed up to 6.0 mph without too much trouble. My basic plan is to continue at 6.0 mph until I build my distance up to 4 miles per day with a long run of 6.5 miles or greater. At that point I’ll probably stop using the treadmill until the winter sets in and run exclusively outdoors.
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