Injury and (Hopefully) Recovery

I haven't written in this blog for over a month.  The last one was at the start of July, talking about my running the Kirkbride half marathon.  My right knee hurt quite badly in the few days after the half marathon, but today was my first proper run since then!  That means it deserves a blog post... Maybe... 😁.

The last month or so have been complicated, as it's the summer holidays...  I've been in the South of France visiting my sister and her husband, and in London and Manchester.  Not much chance to run, and with my sore knee, that was good timing!  My sister has a little treadmill, so while there, on the 11th, 13th and 15th of July I did very slow, very short treadmill runs to test my knee.  The three runs were 12km total at a very slow pace, but my knee felt ok.  I was pleased!  I didn't feel it was completely better, but I thought it was well on the way!

After those little runs I was visiting Manchester for a week, with a plan of seeing a lot of Manchester!  To travel light, and because I still wanted to be wary of my knee, and because I wanted to see loads of Manchester, I decided to simply walk around the city.  A lot!  It’s summer, so I was, of course, wearing shorts and sandals.  Sounded like a plan, and not problematic.  But I was wearing very cheap, unsupportive sandals.  And I guess I was changing my walking style on my right leg to protect my knee.  And after a couple of days walking, I had quite a few sore bits (bleeding because of sandal rubbing) on my toes/feet.  And I maybe overdid the walking!  I’ve just checked, and I walked 156k steps in the 8 days from the 21st to the 28th.  That’s almost a half marathon a day if a step is a metre!  Whatever the reasons, my right knee remained ok, but my right ankle caused me quite a bit of pain!  When I got back, my sister Jo told me to ice and elevate the ankle.  I did that for an hour or so.  And then about half an hour after that I had severe ankle pain.  Very sore indeed!!  I was worried for a bit as I couldn’t get the pain to stop for a couple of minutes, and it was kinda agony!  But since then (about a week ago), with no more ice/elevation, I've been wearing shoes rather than sandals, and not walking too much!  I can still feel the ankle, but today I thought it was solid enough to try another treadmill run in the gym!  The weather was great today, but I couldn’t risk running outside…

How did it go today?  Well, I planned to start slowly, and slowly build up.  I also planned to do no more than 5k regardless of how good I felt.  And obviously much less, maybe only a few seconds if I was in pain.  And I stuck to that plan, and it went well!!!  All the speeds in the following bit are the speeds reported by the treadmill.  I have a Stryd foot-pod, so the distances are accurate.  When I say I did 5k, it was a real 5k.  The treadmill said something like 5.30k distance which is well over the reality!!  Anyway, the run...

I started at 10kmh (which is very slow.  I did that for 2m which is quite a long time before building up.  I then upped it to 10.5kmh for another 2m and 11kmh for a further 2m.  I then upped it to 11.5kmh which is a standard long-distance pace for me – or used to be.  That felt fine, so I stuck to that for another 4m.  As it all felt good, and the running did not feel that hard, I upped it again to 12kmh, and stuck to that for another 4m.  I was now 14m into the run, and I was feeling good, so I upped the pace to 12.5kmh for another 6m or so, until I hit around 20m total.  I only had about 1km to do, max, as I wasn’t going to go over 5k!!  I think I then upped the pace to 13.5kmh.  A bigger increase than any of the previous pace increases, but all still fine.  I got to about 4.5km and upped the pace one final time to 14kmh.  This is probably my parkrun 5k pace, but I was only doing it for 0.5k which was not bad!  I was not finding this easy, but I was pain-free and I felt good!  I kept that 14kmh pace until I hit 5k when I stopped.  Just over 25m for 5k, so not exactly quick, even by my own rubbish standards, but much better than I expected!  And delighted it was pain-free!!  I can feel my ankle this afternoon, but nothing too bad at all!!  I'll stick to the gym treadmill for a week or two, I think.  See how the ankle feels over time 🤞.