2 January 2014

The injection is happening on 2 January. I do not feel too much emotion about this, it just seems like the only next step and the right decision after 8 months of i-think-i-am-getting-better-i-am-not.

So the appointment is booked and the product (diprostene) booked in my local pharmacy to take with me.

The NHS have a site that gives me some helpful insight into my chances of recovery and recovery process: see here. What I retain from this is that I need to ask for local anesthetic (!), that discomfort from the injection itself could last about 48 hours. Improvement is not likely to be quite as quick as I had been hoping "over the next few weeks or months". I \also am going to be asking for a second MRI scan of the "articulation sous-talienne", that is, the foot bit under the main ankle joint.

I have to keep hope however! I will draw up my usual marathon training plan, based on the usual one, but with a few changes I suspect. I am still fascinated in particular about the long run and will be ensuring that I get the balance as bet suited to my needs as possible. Lessons learned from last year's preparation were that the long-run-encompassing-intensity-sections could be very heavy on energy levels and I think I need to proceed carefully to reach these without them destroying my training potential. To be developed once we know training is even possible.

Some more prayer recently for healing has not shown any signs of immediate effect, but the prayers are also that I would honour God through all of this and he knows I am ready to resume to run for him and take to the hills and races for him.

Right, off to have a look at the programme and post a link to a good knee-injury prevention tip I just read in Runner's Weekly! Please see my updated Recovering from injuries and prevention page.

Picking it up

It's a wee bit tricky when you have two "A-races" isn't it? My Autumn goals have centred around the Luberon marathon on 7 October and the SaintElyon on 1 December, two very different challenges. The first one is now obviously over, and so is my first week of recovery from that: Tuesday = 3 mile jog, Friday = 3 mile run, Saturday = 1h50 min off-road gentle and some clambering over rocks. And I feel tired still, not that recent just run hard tired, but a deeper, still-needing-to-recover from 3h04 of grilling myself! And in some ways I should be glad. If the recovery had been really quick (last year's was quicker than this), then maybe I hadn't run as hard as I needed, and proper recovery does take time. In fact, most of us, and I am well and truly in the "most-of-us" category, need to be thinking about a very low number of very-long (marathon and above) events in the year.

But having these two races together, 1 in October and 1 on 1 December, seemed like a really decent gap. The idea was to allow my body to recover from the marathon and then use that training to benefit my first dabble in the Ultra world. I think it will work out, but what I realise now is that actually I have given virtually no thought to how I will build up to Dec 1. My thinking now is to keep it gentle until my body feels able to clock it up a bit, and keep in view a few training programmes for marathon (I use MarathonTalk ("competent") and Runner's World (sub-3) downloads and tweak as needed. The only thing is that even if I were to jump on that band wagon now, I would already be more than half way through! That is quite scary. The key change to those programmes that I will be looking at is extending the easy stuff. I really need to build up to some outings. I estimate the SaintElyon to take me in the region of 7 hours, which is I hope taking into account my lack of experience and forcing a slow 6 min/km-ish pace for the first 50 km. This expectation is of course likely to be tweaked also as I factor in the experience from my remaining long runs.

Incidentally, there is also a long trail event with 1000m of vertical assent of 28.5 km planned for 4 november. This will obviously be one of my long runs that I will be running faster than long-run pace but not flat out either as I will need to be not recovering for the next two weeks, which basically precede my taper period. This planning stuff is quite tough!