Tuesday, September 1, 2009

What Do You Do When Your Body Won’t?

What do you do when your joints won’t recover fast enough for the next run anymore? Two days off after last Saturday’s run and my right ankle is still very sore. Not only that, my left ankle is starting to feel some pain too. Normally, the pain on the right would have subsided by now and the one on the left would be totally gone. I don’t want to worsen the left one because it is my support leg and if that goes, then I would barely be walking. This situation is very frustrating for me. Today’s workout was supposed to be a run after two days of stationary cycling but since I’ve been hurting I opted to do a brisk walk instead. I hope it will give me a chance to recover better to the point where I can at least do a walk/run workout this coming Saturday. The half marathon trainers are supposed to so a 12 miler which is shorter than what I did the other weekend but I wasn’t in as bad a pain then as I am now.

The problem is that during a run when everything seems to be working well, I am able to tolerate some pain and that tolerance could last several hours afterwards while the endorphins are still working in my body. It is when the effect of the bodies’ natural painkiller wears out that I start feeling intense pain. It didn’t help that I had to go to work Saturday night so I wasn’t able to just put my put my feet up and get a load off my joints. It didn’t use to be a problem because I was able to recover better. Nowadays, recovery isn’t happening too well.

When I go for a run now, I never know how much my joints will be able to tolerate and I may be constantly pushing the envelope to see how far I can go. Instead of going 100% all the time, I should dial it down to about 80%. That means I probably should have waited for Kim and Rick to finish drinking at the water fountain last Saturday instead of going out on my own the last two miles of the run. The extra two mile walk after the run didn’t help either. I’ll have to learn self control even if I’m having a good day of running so I don’t debilitate myself. Sorry, but no happy ending to this post.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

hi Noel, how frustrating for you. I have been experiencing something similar with my hip and heel pains all summer. But unlike your advanced PTT condition, my problems were quickly solved.

I don't always expect you to have happy endings to your post. Sometimes you gotta just vent.

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