Training Summary: 7/29 - 8/4

Mon: AM – 4.5 miles; PM – 8.5 miles
Tue: AM – 4.5 miles, including strides; 9.5 miles, including hill bursts
Wed: 2 miles (bailed due to ankle pain)
Thu: 8 miles
Fri: 1 mile (bailed due to ankle pain)
Sat: 0 – day off for ankle
Sun: 0 – day off for ankle
Total: 38 miles

Hopefully it will only be for a very short period of time, but so the surge and my good stretch of training comes to an end. What stinks is I hurt myself doing injury prevention. You have to be special to do that – ha, ha. In an attempt to help my chronic right achilles as well as some slight ankle pain I had been having, I decided to do some ankle strengthening exercises with the idea of adding some stability to my ankle and foot. Well, they backfired big time and put me on the DL as a result.

I think I simply did too much too soon (imagine that), but regardless, by Tuesday afternoon my right ankle was significantly bothering me. I should have scrapped my run that day, but I was pretty sure running didn’t cause the issue and therefore was hopeful running wouldn’t aggravate it. Unfortunately I think I was right about the former but wrong about the latter, because Wednesday was much worse and I had to bail out after a mile and just jog back. Thursday I felt better and went through with a normal run, but that caused another setback, so that I had to bail out again on Friday.

The pain I’m having gets better as I go and is manageable enough after I warm up that I could push my way through it, but I have a feeling that as long as I do so it’s not going to heal up completely. So, here I am after six very solid weeks of training waiting to see how long this issue is going to keep me out, which is frustrating. Furthermore, I still believe my ankle and achilles need to be addressed in order for me to achieve my full potential.  However, I now know one less option for addressing them, and that would be what I did to cause this problem. Perhaps when this issue is gone I can try some less aggressive ankle strengthening, but I will definitely need to be cautious based on how this went.

I had planned on taking a down week with a race at the end this week, but that’s out now. Instead, my goal is to get back to a point where I can resume training and then get back on it. Here’s hoping for a short amount of downtime! Stay tuned.