The last 3 weeks training have been completely hijacked! First by the dreaded gastro bug that wouldn't go away. And this week, the fourth sprained ankle in as many months. Yes, you read correctly, sprain #4!
To be fair the middle two were more of a 'roll' and there was very little swelling/bruising. This time round I did a fairly good job (similar to sprain #1 of the season) and had signficant swelling and pain on weight bearing.
It all started out so good... Tuesday morning I had great motivation - which is often hard to come by at 6.30am - and headed out for a couple of loops around the botanical gardens. Great little training run for the ultra as it's partly trail and has a few steepish sections, including some stair work.
Great intentions turned to custard after about 10 minutes. It may not have been the wisest choice of route considering it was still pretty dark, especially under tree cover. But you can't tell me that when i'm determined and motivated. I need to seize the moment!
Interestingly enough i had just been thinking what a good 'run' i'd been having, several big trail runs with no rolling (on a roll? ok, i'll stop now). Literally about 5 seconds after that thought popped into my head I stepped on a stone the wrong way and over i went. Left ankle. I could tell straight away it wasn't going to be pretty. I pity anyone else that was anywhere near me, trying to enjoy their morning excercise, they would have been rudely interupted by some rather unsavoury language.
I finished my one loop - very slowly, and headed back to work to ice. It's kinda funny that the clumsiest most injury prone person works in a pod with 2 trained physiotherapists and an GP!!! Comes in handy though. Thanks to the help of the lovely Natalie, who strapped me up and gave me great advice, i'm back to running today!
Fast recovery was essential as i'm only 5 weeks out from the race, and have only 3 weekends to get in some last big runs before having a bit of a taper. The plan for tomorrow was to do 40km of trails. However i'm really not keen on doing any more damage so the plan has been scaled back to 21km road run - a bit of a time trial for the half marathon i'll do in May.
The following weekend will be a huge one. 38km dun mountian loop on the saturday, followed by a 20km on sunday. Biggest mileage over the next 3 weeks so here's hoping I have all the injury/illness out of the way!
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