Running is like mouthwash, if you can feel the burn, it's working.... sometimes

A running update!

Well, as some of you know... nope? nobody? Well... I'm doing a marathon... again... The marathon is next weekend (the 8th of February) making this the last week before it... 6 days to go! The last month and a bit has entailed a lot of training, building up to about 65km a week, which peaked about 3 weeks ago before I started 'The Taper'TM.

'The Taper'TM involves cutting back on km's while maintaining speed for the first 2 weeks, then cutting back on everything in the week before the race. Well, last week I ran 21.5km on the Sun and then pushed my shorter, faster run from Tuesday to Wednesday because I was climbing on the Tuesday.

So on the Wednesday, I was only running 6.5km so decided to try to push the pace a little bit. I went out hard at the start... too hard, and started slowing down in my second km. By the time i was passed 5km I'd slowed significantly and just tried to maintain my pace till the end. When I rounded the final corner and only had a couple of hundred metres to go, I tried to push hard and ignore the pain in my lungs, quads, knees, etc, etc... The small pain in my left calf was very easy to ignore for those last few seconds, but not so easy to ignore when it made me limp for the next 2 days!

Seems I had a moderate strain in my calf, or somewhere behind it.

I decided to rest it for a couple of days and on Saturday it was feeling good enough for me to think about a short, easy run to "losen it up". Well after a few steps, the pain was already serious and I thought about just stopping running, but I pushed on anyway. After a while the pain sort of died away, and at the time I thought I could probably run about 21km with that pain at proper pace.

After the run, the pain was back just as bad as ever, and that night I took a more drastic approach downing ibuprofen, alternating ice and heat on my calf and using frequent massage. What ever it was (probably the drugs!) I was feeling fine on Sunday and had a great 10km run @13km/hr. It felt easy and I felt strong.

Still, the pain returned on Monday so I saw a doctor who recommended a physio.

I see that I've fallen into the old trap here, I started this post a couple of days ago, but waffled on so long that I didn't finish it in one go, and didn't get around to posting it till now. I guess I'll just try to keep my posts shorter and more cryptic... Everyone loves a bit of mystery right?

Run on!

~Joe

PS plus I can't be bothered spell or grammer checking this.