Still Failing…

Last week, I went for a run. Not far and not very fast as I have spent most of this year nursing my calf muscle back from injury amidst large amounts of frustration. I have been encouragingly building my distance up very slowly, the week before I ran my longest run of the year at 7 km and have been feeling myself getting stronger with very minimal pain. I went out this run on one of my normal routes near home at a comfortable pace, nice weather, headphones in feeling great. After 3 km into my run I feel familiar pain in my right calf, I immediately stopped and felt the calf and it felt slightly tender, I decided to abandon the run there and walked the remaining kilometre to home and sat down and iced the leg for 15- 20 mins.

This run is now exactly a week ago and I haven’t run since, the calf is not in a world of pain but there is enough pain when I push and prod at the muscle that I know if I start to run again now it will flair up. So at the moment I have quit running. I have made up my mind that I am not going to run again until my calf is completely pain free. I will be back to the Physio this week and try and speed up this process with some sound medical treatment.

I am crossing my fingers that the healing process won’t take too long but calf muscles are notorious for taking a long time to get perfect. When I first did the injury I thought I’d waited longer then necessary to start running again but it appears this wasn’t the case. This time I must wait until it is perfect. It’s a frustrating feeling knowing that running may be a little while away for me.

I have replaced my running with a few efforts on the bike which has not caused any further discomfort to the calf muscle, so at least I can still stay active and fit. I also plan to get myself to the pool this week for a swim or two.

Not running will drive me insane, that is a certainty. I rode my bike past a group of people running last week and felt envious that they were running, even though I was exercising myself at the very time they were. It’s going to be a frustrating period ahead.