Thursday, March 29, 2012

First Injury?

I am pretty sure I am now suffering from my first running injury, and I feel a bit lost.

I'll backtrack. I've been doing my normal runs, three days a week and really getting into a groove with my 5k journey. I have been able to hold a consistent time of around 42 minutes from start to finish and have managed to add a slight bit more distance to my runs - Maybe 2 or 3 more minutes. I am loving outside and can hardly wait until I can get the kids down to sleep so I can head out to run.
The last few runs I have been feeling a bit of "pain" (for lack of a better word) in my Left Ankle area. I suppose its the muscle in that area, and runs up about 3-4 inches above my ankle. I guess for a lack of a better description it feels tight. I have been able to still run on it without much concern, and usually within about an hour of finishing my run, the "pain" goes away as if nothing had happened.

Until yesterday's run.

I went out yesterday, thrilled to run in 14 degree weather. No hat.. No gloves.. and in fact I had to strip my jacket off halfway through. It was a beautiful day and I was having a good run. That is until my Right ankle decided to act up on me. Again, it wasn't enough that I felt the need to stop running, but it was making me feel like something wasn't quite right. When I finished my run, did my stretching and relaxed at home, the pain in my ankle just wasn't disappearing like it had in my left. When i would walk on it, I could feel the area twinge a bit. Again, nothing really painful in any sense, but enough that I noticed something wasn't 100% when I walked around. As the day wore on, this discomfort was not going away, and I fear I might have an injury that could sideline me this weekend.

I am kind of out of place with it. I have never been "Active" in my past life, so injuries were never something I needed to worry about, or deal with. I feel a bit lost. I know that rest is the best thing for it and therefore I should not be running tomorrow for my next scheduled run.

But it honestly makes me feel like I'm a failure, if that makes any sense. I am not in pain. I am not swollen or bruised. I can walk and move around without issue. But yet I can feel this inkling of "not quite right" in it and I know I could wipe out my chances of running my first race in two weeks if I don't rest.
But I still feel like I should be "good enough" to run tomorrow.

Stupid.
The stupid thing is had this happened in the previous life.. an Injury would have probably stopped me from continuing period. I have to accept the fact that if I want to run, there are the possibilities of injuries. Small ones, large ones, it doesn't matter. But if I want to prolong my running days, I need to be able to stop and rest when my body is telling me to.

Obviously my head hasn't quite gotten the message yet. And I know come tomorrow afternoon, I am going to feel incredibly upset that I likely won't be running. I have not missed a single scheduled run since I began my program back in January.

But I guess there is a first time for everything, right?

1 comment:

  1. I still remember the first time I had to miss a run. It was a few months in and I was so sick I could barely walk across the room. Even so, it killed me to miss that run and I had a really really hard time accepting it.

    I think for some of us with a history of inactivity, it's the fear that we'll let it become a habit. One missed run becomes two which becomes a week, and so on...

    But, you WANT to run. So, when this starts feeling better you WILL run. Your head knows that you need to take a short break. Listen to it, then get back to it.

    By the way, we (people in the running and tri world) often refer to that type of thing as a niggle. Like, it's sort of pain, but not quite. More of a warning sign. It's a niggle.

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