Week 35, 2012

Not an injury again...

That was supposed to be the week. With all guests gone, obligations gone and my better half away, I had grand plans. 100K or more. I started easy with a day off on Monday, then a gym on Tuesday followed by the usual interval session at the track in the evening. And this is where the things went south...

During exercises preceding the main part of the workout I felt something snap... something, that later turned out to be a pulled groin muscle. In quite a bit of pain I skipped the remaining part of the exercises and was wondering whether I should call it a day or go ahead with the intervals. I hate to quite and yet getting seriously injured and having to skip a few weeks is certainly not an inviting alternative. I decided to go ahead with the training and quite if it got worse.

It didn't. The pain was there but I though I had it in check. The fastest group was far too fast for me and the one behind was slightly too slow, so I ended up running mostly on my own. We were doing 8x 800m intervals with 3' rest and I averaged 3:51min/km; not great but not bad either.

After the training I went home and once cooled down I realized that I'm in trouble. The pain got pretty bad and I had no illusions anymore: that was an injury that would keep me away from running for a while. Damn. The Berlin preparations were not so great anyway and now this....

I took two days completely off and on Friday went to see a PT. Gladly by that time the pain was getting less annoying and his magic fingers helped even further so, just as I was hoping to, I got a green light to try some easy running.

At first it was painful so on Friday I could only do 8K jogging at 6:22min/km. Well, at least I was moving. On Saturday I stepped it up to 13K at 5:37min/km and on Sunday, while still feeling the pain, I went for an 18K run, with the main 15K part at an average pace of 5:13min/km and the last 3K even below 5:00min/km. None of those qualifies as a serious training and it wasn't anything like what I had planned, but at least it seems I'm right on track to recovery.

However, this is a bit worrying in the larger context, as it's the second injury I have this year (I had serious shin problems in January). That means that, if I want to be serious about ultramarathon training, it's time to start thinking about some injury prevention actions: stretching and strength training are two things that come to mind and which I'll have to seriously consider.

After three days of running I'm planning to take Monday off, then I'll not (yet) risk a speed training on Tuesday, but I hope to do some serious training on my own and by the end of the week I hope to be as good as new; I better be as that will leave only two weeks of training before Berlin...

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