So my little toe is still not happy!! It's surprising that an angry wound on a swollen toe didn't take to a ten-mile race through muddy and sandy bogs a little better! I got no sleep Sunday night as every time my toe touched the duvet I woke up. I tried to create some form of elevated leg sling, but only succeeded in waking the rest of the house.
Monday’s training was a no go. I spent the day covered in salt water and TCP! But it seemed to be helping. The wound was healing a bit and the swelling had all but disappeared. I forgot about Tuesdays easy morning run and put all my toes efforts on completing the evening track session. Far from being able to ease the toe in, I was faced with an increased workload. My coach had upped our total session distance from the usual six or seven thousand metres, to ten thousand, which is quite a jump! But I was game, and thankfully much like my trail race it was freezing cold, which numbed my toe a treat.
No sense, no feeling - just like the head of a long distance runner! The ten thousand meters was broken up into an initial 3 x 1600m, a 1200m, another 1600m, an 800 and a final 1600. When the format was read out it all sounded a bit daunting, big distance, lots of reps, and too much to remember! However, the impact was softened by alternating the reps between a hard and a steady/hard pace. It was actually quite enjoyable. I was able to relax and recover on the slower reps then regain focus for the hard ones. I was hitting the targets and feeling good throughout. But it was tough. The distance slowly wore you down, you could really feel it on the last couple and I knew I was working hard and ready to blow on our last lap.
For me this was closer to replicating a race progression, namely a longer, slower progression of fatigue. The oxygen dept and lactate build up only come through strongly close to the end of the run.
Pacing was also crucial much like an actual race. In a shorter session you can get away with pacing too fast, but in a session of this length any over-exertion is going to cause the pain to be two fold at the end. As for the toe, I only became aware of it on the last rep, but by that time everything was hurting a bit, from my head to my toes, so it just joined the queue! For the rest of the week toe-wise it was a case of slow healing. Each run knocked the recovery back a bit, but in between sessions things were looking a lot better, the situation was being managed well, eventually it would be fully healed.
Training got back to normality. Long recovery runs on Wednesday, and a fifty-minute run, incorporating 10 x 1 minute efforts, on Thursday, followed by easy runs on Thursday and Friday evening.
Saturday’s session in Richmond Park was a hard 15-minute tempo run, 5 on the steepest and slippiest hill in the whole of London! and a final 5-minute tempo to finish. All aided by a strong, freezing cold wind. It was one of those days I wish I'd parked much closer to the park. In between reps and on my cool down I was dreaming of my car and its heater. But the work got done and it should all toughen me up. I closed the week with a mid-afternoon 90 minutes on Sunday. The sun was shinning, I felt no pain from my toe, I was relaxed and really enjoying my running. If it could be like that every time, I'd be a truly happy runner!
Thursday 18 December 2008
Monday 15 December 2008
Mon 17th of November - Sun 23rd of November
This week I was ready to continue the good progress I'd made already this winter. I had another race on Sunday and having performed reasonably well in my double header race, I was looking to put in a solid weeks training, finishing it off with another strong race performance at the Saab Salomon Turbo X trail run. But my week didn't quite go to plan.
It all started well enough, with a couple of easy recovery runs on Monday, and a reasonably solid Tuesday speed session on the road. Running the same session as a month ago, 6 x 1400 on the road, I was able to complete each rep between five and ten seconds faster than my previous attempt. Things were looking up. However, this all changed during Wednesday mornings innocent looking twenty minute recovery run.
It's annoying when you get injured, but its part and parcel of athletics. You expect a muscle pull or a tight tendon and taking time out is the only way to recover, but to take time out for a blister seems ridiculous. Even more ridiculous is when it's because you're wearing a novelty pair of socks, just because you've been too lazy to wash your stinky running socks! But that's what happened, and to make matters worse the blister got torn off during my longer afternoon run, and the muddy off road nature of the run did me no favours. An infected swollen toe kept me out of action for two days. It didn't even look that bad so I got no sympathy, not even from my Mummy! But it really blooming hurt. I wore flip-flops everywhere, which looked quite odd in Asda in the middle of winter!
With a race on Sunday I was eager to see if I could run on my bad foot, so I turned up for training on Saturday morning. It was not feeling good during the warm up. Every step was painful, and I feared it would get worse when we ran faster. Amazingly it actually felt better when we were going for it. The extra force was pushing my toes flatter as I landed, meaning the toe was prevented from rubbing on the inside of my shoe. So I gave myself the OK to race, all I had to do was alter my warm up.
Sunday morning came round and I prepared for the race. As it was to be a trail race with lots of mud and water I plastered up my toe and attempted to waterproof it with duck tape! All in all, a highly scientific bit of bodge work. I then opened the curtains to have a look at what conditions we'd be running in - SNOW!
Driving to the race I was well aware that it was going to be a cold one, and it truly was. One slight benefit was that as soon as my bad toe got dunked in the first puddle it was immediately frozen and numbed to any pain, but I just couldn't get the rest of me going.
I was stuck in second gear and as much as I wanted to press the accelerator, to keep up with the leaders, there was just nothing there to press. I was OK in third wading through puddles with shards of ice floating about, climbing over sand banks and through thick mud, until I fell over. I managed to fall into the deepest coldest puddle on the course. I went in head first, and came out frozen, soaking wet and covered in a strange sand coloured gloop!
I completely lost it from then on. I was cold and not very happy and I had no confidence going into any puddle, “tippy-toeing” my way through, losing masses of time but ensuring I stayed upright. I got through the rest of the race ok, but was frozen. I changed quickly into two t-shirts, two fleece tops, a gillet, coat, hat and two pairs of gloves and socks. With the heater on full I was just about thawed out by the time I was home. Now I'm dry I can look back and admit I actually enjoyed it, but I don't think my foot did. As I thawed out, the pain got worse. My toe was not happy and let me know all day and night. But I'd do it again. I just hope I still have ten toes to do it with!
It all started well enough, with a couple of easy recovery runs on Monday, and a reasonably solid Tuesday speed session on the road. Running the same session as a month ago, 6 x 1400 on the road, I was able to complete each rep between five and ten seconds faster than my previous attempt. Things were looking up. However, this all changed during Wednesday mornings innocent looking twenty minute recovery run.
It's annoying when you get injured, but its part and parcel of athletics. You expect a muscle pull or a tight tendon and taking time out is the only way to recover, but to take time out for a blister seems ridiculous. Even more ridiculous is when it's because you're wearing a novelty pair of socks, just because you've been too lazy to wash your stinky running socks! But that's what happened, and to make matters worse the blister got torn off during my longer afternoon run, and the muddy off road nature of the run did me no favours. An infected swollen toe kept me out of action for two days. It didn't even look that bad so I got no sympathy, not even from my Mummy! But it really blooming hurt. I wore flip-flops everywhere, which looked quite odd in Asda in the middle of winter!
With a race on Sunday I was eager to see if I could run on my bad foot, so I turned up for training on Saturday morning. It was not feeling good during the warm up. Every step was painful, and I feared it would get worse when we ran faster. Amazingly it actually felt better when we were going for it. The extra force was pushing my toes flatter as I landed, meaning the toe was prevented from rubbing on the inside of my shoe. So I gave myself the OK to race, all I had to do was alter my warm up.
Sunday morning came round and I prepared for the race. As it was to be a trail race with lots of mud and water I plastered up my toe and attempted to waterproof it with duck tape! All in all, a highly scientific bit of bodge work. I then opened the curtains to have a look at what conditions we'd be running in - SNOW!
Driving to the race I was well aware that it was going to be a cold one, and it truly was. One slight benefit was that as soon as my bad toe got dunked in the first puddle it was immediately frozen and numbed to any pain, but I just couldn't get the rest of me going.
I was stuck in second gear and as much as I wanted to press the accelerator, to keep up with the leaders, there was just nothing there to press. I was OK in third wading through puddles with shards of ice floating about, climbing over sand banks and through thick mud, until I fell over. I managed to fall into the deepest coldest puddle on the course. I went in head first, and came out frozen, soaking wet and covered in a strange sand coloured gloop!
I completely lost it from then on. I was cold and not very happy and I had no confidence going into any puddle, “tippy-toeing” my way through, losing masses of time but ensuring I stayed upright. I got through the rest of the race ok, but was frozen. I changed quickly into two t-shirts, two fleece tops, a gillet, coat, hat and two pairs of gloves and socks. With the heater on full I was just about thawed out by the time I was home. Now I'm dry I can look back and admit I actually enjoyed it, but I don't think my foot did. As I thawed out, the pain got worse. My toe was not happy and let me know all day and night. But I'd do it again. I just hope I still have ten toes to do it with!
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