Fraser Darcy

I had a lot of optimism this time by the end of last week. Yeah my ankle feels alright, it’ll start to come good soon. I had just completed the biggest week of my running career and felt very fit. The Quorn heat was starting to get annoying to train in but the body was adapting to it. I kept pushing the envelope to start the week with my normal amount of easy running on Monday. The normal symptoms of being stiff to start with but then easing up once I got a few km’s down the road were present. What I should’ve done though, either on Monday or any of the days in the two weeks previous where I have had a sore ankle, is take some rest to let it get to a point where there is no symptoms or pain. The ‘pain’ and mental anguish of taking a rest though, and becoming undisciplined in my view, is worse than the pain of having a sore ankle. So I kept taking the ‘easy’ way out by just continuing with my normal training.

This led to Tuesday morning’s session where I repeated what I did last Friday. Warm-up, 6*1k, 4*400, 4*160m, warm down. I improved my paces and felt like I worked hard. A simple recipe of a good run. The optimism was building in my fitness. If I can squeeze out km reps at these paces, imagine what I could do for a 5km now. The ankle pain didn’t bother me in these hard efforts but it was a bit sorer afterwards. No different to how it had been feeling for the past two weeks.

Wednesday is when the wave of optimism I’d been riding came crashing down. The pain in my ankle never went away in the first few km’s of my mid-week long run but I didn’t decide to pull the pin early. I’m out here already, I may as well just finish the 25km’s I have planned and then see how things turn out. To add to my ankle pain, my body just generally felt pretty exhausted with the combined factors of the heat and the session the day before adding up. I was glad I finished it in the end, oh look how tough I am, I can run 25km no matter what, but I initiated full damage control proceedings after that. Instead of just relying on the occasional bit of icing and anti-inflammatories to try and feel like I was making some sort of effort to repair my ankle I bought some ice and started being more diligent with the recovery process. It’s been two weeks of this thing and it’s not getting better so I have to change my tactic before it forces me too.

Too late. Thursday came along and despite the ankle feeling not too bad on Wednesday’s arvo run, Thursday morning was a disaster. The pain felt different and was restricting my gait for the whole 7km’s I managed. I cut it short there. I had planned on 16km’s, and jumped on the bike for an hour instead. The worst part about cutting a run short is feeling like you’re a failure. You’ve planned out your day, and your training for the week, and month afterwards, all around the fact that you believe that’s the best way to make you a better runner, by doing all this running you’ve planned. You get so absorbed in the plan that you neglect to think that running on a sore appendage is probably not the smartest way to make you a better runner, which is always the ultimate goal. It takes 7km of pain and hobbling to remember that though and force the ‘easy’ way on to you by taking the pain of scrapping the plan instead of the pain of the run. Yep, the pain of feeling like a failure was less than the pain of the injured run.

Shit. Now what? Cross-train and hope the ankle improves really. The frustrating thing is that there is no pain when I’m resting, nothing I can really massage and some times when I get up and walk around it feels fine and other times it feels really really stiff. How long will I be waiting? How much fitness will I lose? Is it still worth entering the 3km and 5km races I have planned for next week? When will it get better and why is that a question that never has an answer? It’s not quite Junkie Limbo from Trainspotting but it could be the next worst thing.

For almost ten consecutive weeks in this block, and longer if you count all my training history, I’ve been telling myself that the only way to get better at running is by running more. But in Runners Limbo you have to either believe the complete opposite for an indefinite period that not running and actually resting will make you a better runner or that by resting you’ll have to take the hit of losing fitness to be able to regain it in some far-off fantasy world where you are not injured. It’s hard to believe such a world exists just as it’s hard to remember what it’s like to run without pain. It’s essentially hard to get your head out of the small box you’re thinking in and remember the bigger picture. Poor old Renton can’t escape his bedroom and I can’t think outside the box for a day or two.

It’s not hard to see why my thinking is caught in the box. You’re always told to live in the present of course. Keep your focus on what’s happening immediately in front of you. But the present sucks because I can’t run so it feels better to instead try and go for a run to hold on to the past for as long as possible (which is what I did for two weeks). And that’s how I ended up ruining the future of my running by becoming too injured to run at all. Like Renton tossing in his bed my mind is tossing itself around doing all the mental gymnastics to make it feel like I’m doing the right thing. You’ll be fine in a couple of days if you rest well. Other runners take a week off and come back fine. Heck, doing some easy days will almost be like you’re tapering to be fresh for a big effort when your ankle is fine.

On Friday my ankle felt better than Thursday. There was none of the discomfort I felt on Thursday morning but the general stiffness was back. Likely what I had done was on Tuesday I pushed it too hard, over-compensated for the discomfort I then felt on Wednesday by changing my gait slightly and tightened something else up. The easy day on Thursday had relieved the ‘new’ pain and now Friday’s rest day of just doing some cycling and mobility work would hopefully clear up the ankle stiffness. Then I would be able to get back into easy running on Saturday or Sunday at the latest. Best case scenario I still might hit 150-160km’s for the week.

I should’ve stayed in bed though to make that plan a reality. Instead, I went out on Saturday to the Quorn unofficial parkrun with a stiff ankle that never loosened up. I was running fine but it didn’t feel enjoyable at all. Back to the bike I went. And another day in Runners limbo. The only way I’m staying optimistic through this is by trying to convince myself that if I can nail this rest period with a good attitude it’ll give me more confidence when I get my next injury down the track. Plus, the further I got down the rabbit hole of following my own training plan for 10 weeks, the more I became a regimented runner afraid of pushing it too hard and breaking through onto the other side. By throwing out the schedule I had planned and with a bit of unknown thrown into the mix I’ve now placed myself in a scrappy little fight to get organised for the 3km race next Thursday. Anything could happen after a few days off. I’ve got even more of a nothing to lose attitude now. I enjoy running for the personal challenge it creates and instead of having a challenge to run 200km in a week I’ve got a different challenge on my hands but a challenge nonetheless. Fix my ankle.

The other attitude I have to adopt is that if I think I’m so great at running, what will two-three days off really do to me anyway? If I am good enough and a good ‘athlete’ I should be someone who approaches recovery periods as diligently as training periods and tick all the boxes in making sure I am ready to go in a few days or in a few weeks, whatever it is. Plus, any positivity I can find in my ultimately failed strategy is something to hold on to so I don’t fall into a bottomless pit of despair. As I watered the garden on Saturday afternoon I realised, hey, if I’d taken some rest two weeks ago to fix this ankle that still would’ve meant I would’ve taken two-three rest days. As long as I’m back running by say Tuesday next week I actually won’t have been too impacted. If anything, pushing through the ankle pain for a couple of weeks led to a few really great runs I’m proud to look back on for the future (like hitting a 2:44 km rep). If I’d taken the two-three rest days straight after the Dolphin 10km I would’ve been less optimistic about my fitness, wouldn’t have cracked three big weeks in a row and then maybe would’ve been a bit gun shy about doing that in the future. Instead, I’ve had to take my rest now, a little close to a 3km race but probably good for a freshen up and far enough away from the marathon at the end of April, and hopefully, pray to Jesus and Allah and Buddha, that it only requires a few days of rest like originally thought. If it takes more than a few days then I’ll know I really cooked it and I can give myself a big smack on the head.

Such long thoughts are a product of being in runners limbo. Ultimately, whether I’m training or in runners limbo, the body doesn’t know. The body doesn’t read my spreadsheet or see my Strava. Heck, my body could think we’re about to launch into an A grade race tomorrow considering the load I’ve put it through in the last few days is eerily similar to a taper. To make it out of runners limbo I just have to trust that my body is doing my mind a solid and working hard on repairing any damage to what I suspect is some sore ankle tendons.

That body/mind repair damage relationship showed some promising signs on Sunday. My sleep stats on Saturday night, after three consecutive low volume running days, were the best they have been in at least 8 months. That shows perhaps maybe I am absorbing the training stress I’ve been under and once the body has done that it can fix the tendon stress and I can go back to loading up the training once again. The good sleep hadn’t translated into a fully recovered ankle just yet though so I avoided running at all on Sunday and instead rode my bike for two hours and did some mobility. That doesn’t really tell you exactly about how my ankle tendons felt. What does is the fact I have been walking without discomfort for most of the afternoon since my mobility drills. Probably because I was a good little boy and loaded up my tendons with some extra weight (tendons like that to repair themselves I’m told by those in the know). I maybe could’ve run come Sunday afternoon. Would’ve been nice to. Would’ve also pushed me over the 100km barrier for the week. It would’ve also been a momentarily relapse though, just one last hit, that could’ve pushed me back a bit.

The plan of attack for this coming week is to knock out some more good resting overnight and be a diligent little clever athlete who brushes his teeth, makes his bed and ices his sore ankle. Best case scenario is I can be back running tomorrow or Tuesday with no more rest days after that. Worst case scenario is probably I have to spend more days cross-training and pull out of the 3k race. To be honest though, until two weeks ago I hadn’t even considered this 3k race so it’s not the end of the world. To be really honest as well and look at the even bigger picture, not running because I’m injured isn’t even the end of the world either. There’s a lot of other cool stuff I got done this week and will do next week that doesn’t involve running. All that other stuff is best encapsulated by the term ‘life’ stuff. So yeah even though I’m choosing not to run at the moment for risk of severe long-term damage and pain, I am choosing the rest of my future and the rest of my life at the moment. That’s not so bad is it? Is it?