Moving right along...

It appears that my foot injury is over before it even started.  My visit to Adam, coupled with not running until yesterday, seems to have been all that was needed to let things settle.  The lump is still there and it still hurts if I press on it ('then stop pressing on it!' I hear you say), but it doesn't hurt when I run and that is all that matters.  I'll keep an eye (a finger?) on it just in case it morphs into something massive but otherwise, I will erase all thoughts of it from my mind.

The extra rest did my legs some (brief) good.  I felt light and springy for the first half of Saturday's threshold session (2x8 minutes Kenyan Hills - which requires running up a hill for 60 seconds at threshold pace and then back down the hill at threshold pace, and repeating for 8 minutes - with another 8 minute threshold run along the flat added on after each Kenyan Hill set); by the second half, though, I was back to my more familiar 'argh, I'm going to die!' mode.  Fortunately, I'm a lot better now at realising that these thoughts are just in my head and have nothing to do with what's happening with my legs, so I just carried on.

Today's run was 150 hilly off-road minutes where it was just about time on feet.  I started off with 25 minutes running/5 minutes walking and repeated this three times, then got annoyed because all of my walk breaks were coinciding with the downhill sections - what's the point in having walk breaks if you can't walk up the bloody hills?  I therefore switched to 9 minutes running/1 minute walking to maximise the possibility that at least some of the walk breaks would coincide with at least some of the uphills.  This had the desired effect and, all things considered, it ended up being a very enjoyable run on a crisp, clear, sunny winter's day.

It's nice to be back on my feet.

Today's run, brought to you by the lovely & comfortable Brooks Cascadia 12.

Nowhere to hide

There comes a time in every runner’s relationship with her support team when it becomes clear that they know her so well that they can predict what she is going to do before she does it.  For example, that’s why Adam knows to precisely define what ‘taking it easy’ means when he is giving instructions for looking after niggles and injuries.  He knows that I have my own definition of that and I need to be explicitly told what to do.  Merely telling me to be SENSIBLE doesn’t work, but it took him ages to figure that out.

Ben’s understanding of me has now officially reached the mind-reading stage.  I had let him know that Adam wanted me to ‘take it easy’ on Tuesday and Wednesday (apparently that did not include doing the scheduled threshold session even at a slightly slower pace, or even doing the 40-minute easy-effort run; what Adam actually had in mind was me doing those sessions at the gym on the bike or the cross-trainer), and I duly reported to Ben after Tuesday’s gym session that I had done it but hated it.  Mainly because I had forgotten my earphones and so had to listen to the gym’s choice of techno music for an hour.

Wednesday morning rolled around and I had convinced myself to give the 40-minute easy-effort session a miss because, really, what possible difference would that make in the scheme of things?  I was in the process of coming up with a plausible excuse to give to Ben when what should ping into my inbox but an email from him.  ‘What are you doing?  Get out there and do that session.  I don’t care how miserable you think it will be, go and do it and then complain to me later.’  Bloody hell, how did he know???  It kind of freaked me out but it did make me put on my running kit and get out the door.

The gym was fine, mainly because I remembered my headphones.  And I didn’t even complain to Ben afterwards because where’s the fun in complaining if you’ve been given permission to do so?

Sigh.  I am now officially an Open Book.

If the stone hurts...

I thought that I had escaped Saturday's 4-hour run unscathed and, in most ways, I did.  Immediately after the run, my legs felt stiff and achey but that was to be expected, and within 24 hours they felt fine again.  What I didn't expect to find, however, as I prepared for bed on Saturday night, was a bruised and swollen section across the middle of the sole of my right foot.  It didn't hurt during the run, it didn't hurt during the rest of the evening, but it was very tender when I put some recovery arnica cream on my feet before bed.  Weird.  And it was still there Sunday morning, along with a couple of little bumpy nodule-type things that hurt when I pressed them.  So I iced and arnica-ed and compression socked myself for the rest of the day to no avail.  It still felt like I had a huge bruise across the bottom of my foot and all that I could think was that this had been caused by running across numerous sections of sharp stones, which I felt even through the sturdy soles of my trail shoes.

On Saturday afternoon, I had magnanimously given up today's appointment with Adam so that Bassman could be seen instead (having sustained his first running-related injury a few days previously).  On Sunday afternoon, I clawed back part of that appointment for my own use.  Nothing like the fear of plantar fasciitis to squash my altruistic tendencies. 

Adam was his usual sympathetic and supportive self, although I could tell that an eye-roll when I mentioned PF wasn't far off.  He had a feel of my foot and yes, it hurt.  IT HURT A LOT, especially when he pressed on the spot where the nodule-type thing is.  He thought that there was a bit of swelling but that the main source of pain was the nodule-type thing, which he thought felt like a cyst.  And then, in between him doing his job of causing me so much pain that I didn't even have enough breath to curse, we tried to puzzle out what else this could be besides a cyst.

Bastard stones.

Adam thought that my hypothesis of sharp-stone-induced-bruising was a possibility.  Funny, though, how pain clears your brain.  After a particularly excruciating manipulation, I had an epiphany:  I suddenly remembered that for at least the last 3 miles of the run, I had a couple of small but painful stones rattling around in my shoe and that they kept getting stuck under my arch until I managed to dislodge them permanently down towards my toes.  Adam just looked at me as I disclosed this and I said it before he could:  I'm such an idiot.

So, yes, my nodule-type thing could well be a cyst or even Plantar Fibromatosis.  But it's far more likely at this point that it is bruising and trauma caused by 1) running across sharp rocks without due care and attention and 2) being too lazy to stop and de-stone my shoe.  Sigh.  I've now learned why the ultra rule of 'Take care of the little things before they become big things' is a rule.  I won't make that mistake again.

I am trying not to be the Other People.

It’s a whole new world

One of the benefits of having a running coach is not having to think about what I’m doing or even why I’m doing it.  Gone are the days of obsessing for hours/days/weeks over which training programme has the best chance of getting me to the start line uninjured.  Now I have Coach Ben, who sends me two weeks of training every two weeks and who is available by phone, email, and text to answer any questions, discuss strategy, and basically calm me down when I panic that I’m injured (‘It’s just your body getting used to the new training volume’) or that I can’t do whatever run he has set me (‘It’s supposed to be tough, now get out there and do it!’).  I focus on one run at a time and don’t really pay attention to how it all fits together or to my progress.  That’s Ben’s job, and I trust him.

Because I just get on with it and don’t look at the big picture lest I freak myself out, I’ve pretty much felt over the past 6 weeks like I’m doing marathon training which is fine because that is familiar to me.  I’m vaguely aware that I’m now running 4 days/week and that a lot of my runs are now on consecutive days and that the volume has been creeping up, but I don’t think about it a lot.  A run is just a run.

Today, though, I couldn’t ignore any longer that I am doing Ultra Training.  Yesterday, I ran for an hour.  Today, I ran for four hours.  When I saw this in my training schedule, I sent Ben an ‘OMG, I can’t do that, it’s too hard, you’re trying to kill me’ text.  He replied that he had expected that reaction from me (yep, my first reaction is always an overreaction) and that it didn’t matter how much I whinged, I still had to do it.  He did reassure me that the four hour run was just about time on feet and that I was expected to do a run-walk and that if I managed 13 miles, that would be fine.  13 miles???  I could walk that in four hours...

We negotiated a run-walk strategy for the first three hours, and he left it up to me what I did with the fourth hour.  I could even walk the whole hour if I wanted to.  And so I set out with absolutely no idea what to expect.  I was supposed to run sloooow, and if I had gone any slower I’d have been walking.  I did 15 miles in the first three hours and my legs were feeling fine, if a bit tired, but then I had a panic that possibly doing 20 miles in total would be Entirely Too Much so increased my walking breaks and finished up with 18.75 miles.  And this after doing 6 miles yesterday.

I’m in completely new territory with this.  I’m taking a bit of time to feel pleased that I ran for 4 hours and that my legs are already starting to recover, and I’m taking some time to acknowledge how far I’ve come from the days when 3 days/week and never more than 15 miles/ week were all that my legs could manage.  But tomorrow I’ll be back to head in the sand and one run at a time, with no acknowledgement that I’m actually running towards an ultra at the end of March.

Complete and utter denial works well for me.

There's always a bright side

Yesterday's threshold run fell into the 'just get out there and get it done' category.  There had been snow on and off all day and the wind had been gusting to 50mph but by 5pm, the skies had cleared and the wind had dropped to 20mph.  Just in time to squeeze in my run.

So I bundled up in my winter jacket, windproof tights (I had forgotten that I had these - what a joy they have been to wear!), gloves, buff to keep my neck warm, and headband to keep my ears warm and set out for a 10 minute warm-up, 4x8 minutes at threshold effort, and a 10 minute cool-down.  I tried to find a route that minimised the impact of the wind but I'm in Shetland this week, which means that no matter what direction you face, you're facing into the wind.  Oh well.  Mental toughness, right?

And I was tough - I kept my effort at threshold level into the wind, up the inclines, and even when I had to dodge pedestrians who got blown into my path - but then, two minutes into the last interval, it started to hail.  Fortunately this didn't last long; unfortunately, the hail changed to sleet, which changed to snow, which changed back to sleet again.  In case you were wondering, 20mph wind and sleet are not a good combination.  It felt like the skin was being flayed from my face.  I had to stop (pausing my Garmin, of course) to transform my buff into a balaclava in an attempt to protect my face from the elements.  And then I had to stop again 30 seconds after that because I couldn't see where I was going due to white-out conditions.  Once I could see enough to stay on the path, I finished the interval as quickly as I could without sliding off the path into the loch.  Phew.  Only a 10 minute cool-down run back to the house was left.  It sleeted the whole way.

I was very thankful to step through my front door, but then I caught sight of myself in the hall mirror.  My hair was iced over and had frozen to my head but more alarming was my fringe, which had frozen at a right angle to my head and looked like a windsock.  Oh, the horror.

Still, it could have been worse.  I could have had to do this run on the treadmill.