My injured month of doom

24 Jan: 10 mile run 
25 Jan: Ill-advised hill rep session

26 Jan: Gentle run ends early because calf is throbbing, pain worse after my run which has never happened to me before. Suspect I shouldn’t have done back to back LSR and hills. Take a week off.
3 Feb: Manage to get a PB in my club’s handicap race The Stag but calf still niggly

6 Feb: Run a 10k in London, bearable pain but no strength in my dead legs, decide to take another week off

14 Feb: Run 6 miles pain free, dull ache, feel like a beast, so happy…

15 Feb: Return home after 1.5 miles because calf pain back 

26 Feb: Run half a mile and there’s been no change after 11 days rest. Give up.

2 March: Do the Stag again, but this time it’s awful because I’ve lost a lot of fitness & finish 4 minutes slower than a month ago. Gutted because I was on a good streak!

5 March: Decide to give up resting because it’s not helping. Run a terrible time at Parkrun but happy to be back in my running shoes. 

All of my training since Christmas has now gone to shit but without a marathon to worry about, I intend on building it back up (sensibly!) and hopefully my injury will disappear on its own. Before “the month of doom”, I’d started to run sub-8 minute miles, which I never imagined would happen…

So to conclude – Rest is just as important as training! It’s hard to accept that you can overtrain when you’re a slowbod like me, but it’s all relative. I am still sulking because I was on TOP FORM a month ago but I’m going to work extra hard to get back there!*

*Unless my calf gets worse again. And then I’ll become a swimmer.