Hi BMFs, been a while ...
TLDR - Im injured and whine a lot
Ive been fighting a couple of injuries the past month or so. Ive not been looking forward to getting back to this thread as its hard for me to hear about all the work folks are putting in knowing I'm not able to, and how much I want to. I also know this is rather selfish and petty and that part of it doesn't make me feel good. I can say that reading
@JShare87 RR has motivated me to try and get back to the chat.
A little more than a week before my planned run with
@gianmarco I suffered a weird injury. I was running intervals in my 2nd week of a build week which was the hardest ive ever worked out in my life. I felt great. During the run I knew I was working hard, but no indication that anything was amok. Out of the blue my left leg just stopped firing. When I say that, I mean there was no pop, no pain, no anything. I literally looked down at my leg like WTF? It was on the front of my leg, but not my quad, not my groin, but like a hip flexor. After a couple seconds I could feel discomfort in that knee and weirdness in my hip. I then cut it off to an endurance pace. I kept up the jogish pace and the discomfort didn't go away. I stopped and walked for a bit. I hate walking. Walking during a workout is the end of the world for me. I kept that up for a few minutes and just jogged through it back to the office.
In making a long story not longer, I messed up my Hip Flexor (HF) or rectus femoris as my wife diagnosed. Over the next week and a half a tried to run through it by reducing intensity and distance, taking extra time off, etc. Nothing worked. However, since I am an ego driven moron I kept the run with BMF. I mean, I really really wanted to do it. I was looking forward to it. I decided I would take 600mg of Advil before the run and suffer whatever consequences came. Not the smartest of choices but my hope was that it wouldn't make it worse. The run was great (other than
@gianmarco shoving me down at the end because he couldn't keep up) and the conversation was even better. I was really glad that I did it and I wouldn't trade it at all. While im sure the run didn't help my recovery, I don't think it made it worse.
Today is 4 weeks since the injury. I still cant even skip around without feeling it. On this past Sunday i tried to stretch it out for 25 min with the slowest possible pace I could run. Literally I have never run with such a low HR. After 12 minutes I could feel the HF and it 20 minutes it was a problem with manifesting pain in my knee (we believe this is due to compensation of the muscle issue). Just a brutal let down feeling.
Gratitude: I am grateful I can bike. I am grateful that after progress from 2nd injury I can swim. Most importantly that I can get outside in this beautiful weather. For about a week I couldnt workout at all and I was miserable.
Im supposed to have a family 5k run this weekend, not going to happen. I supposed to have my first sprint tri of the season in 2 weeks on 6/16, WTF am I going to do?
More humbly, this has really messed up training schedule for my first Ironman Aug 18 in Mont-Tremblant. For this race I need to swim 2.4 miles, bike 112 miles, and run 26.2. This is a very hilly course. To put my predicament into focus, I have biked longer than 70 miles once (last season). I have
never run farther than 14 miles in a single event. My longest suffering race session is like 6 hours. Needless to say my confidence is not high and frankly there is nothing I can do about it. I feel not in control.
I have about 2 months to get this back on track and Im not confident its going to happen and that's killing me inside. I put too much pressure on myself about failure. Its like Jimmy Connors "I hate to lose more than I love to win". I feel that once I commit to something, failure is not an option - like its the end of the world. Like if I don't complete this it makes me a bad person or a failure as a person. That trait is a positive most of the time in the drive to being successful, but in some instances, like this one where the commitment really isn't that important in the scheme of things, and where I don't really have any control in the situation, I cannot figure out how to let it go. All I can think about is how do I still achieve my goal.
I know Im doing the right things. I know Im doing that things I have control over. Just the mental side of this is so very fatiguing for me. It also makes me anti-social which is the opposite of my personality. In addition, like 97% of the muscles in my body are hungry. I actually feel very strong after every work out. I feel like I want to go run right this second, maybe 2 runs. But I cant.
PS - Ill get to my other freakish injury in another post. Writing this one has taken enough out of me.
