Well that's it. What can I say. I seemed to have found a way to once again completely throw a monkey wrench into my plans for a successful run at 3 Days. Wednesday was supposed to be a nice easy long run of 30 miles or so and it turned out to be a 6 mile run. Finishing up the first of 5 loops I rounded a corner on the trail and went down on a patch of ice. I landed in a way that tweaked my quad just above the left knee. At first I thought it was just a muscle spasm followed by a pretty good cramp. After trying to jog back to the car to refill my bottle from the loop. I realized it was much worse. I tried to put a neoprene sleeve over that area of the knee and quad but couldn't even manage to get 100 yards from my car without the pain screaming at me to stop.
Extremely frustrated I am at the prospect of having to possibly drop out of 3 Days this year. I am in really great shape. Better than I've ever been leading up to a race. The 90 to 100 mile weeks seemed effortless and I was adapting to the mileage well. Then to have something like this happen and screw all my plans up. I'm so pissed off. I feel ripped off.
Is it selfish of me to feel this way? Hell yeah! Running is a selfish sport. All the hard work I put in to getting myself to the point where I thought I could really do something special this time. The two a days. The long run every weekend. The lifting. The diet and most importantly the time away from the family logging 13 to 17 hrs a week towards training. Was it all for nothing? I feel like now it was.
I want to scream out loud at everyone I see. I want to curse god but I won't. I want to make a deal with the devil but I'm to scared to do that. I want to do something but I can't. I just want the chance to be able to run like I had trained to do. All I can do is sit here and hope that my body will heal in time for the race. I pray that somewhere deep inside I have some kind of superhuman gene in me. That gives me the ability to repair torn muscles three times faster than the normal human but that's just ridiculous.
I'm still gong to show up to the race hoping to be able to run well. I've been able to still get on the treadmill at a 10 min pace per without too much discomfort. Still I know its there and I'm afraid of what might happen if I drop the hammer. Mentally that just wipes out whatever edge I may have had coming into 3 Days confidence wise. Its no way to run a race B-bopping along waiting for your leg to blow. Knowing that it could and holding back so it won't.
Anyway like I said that's that. Its over. There is nothing I can do except ice the shit out of it and take Ibuprofen to try and reduce the swelling so that it may heal faster. Increase my protein consumption and get plenty of rest. Maybe this was a sign to start tapering sooner for these things. Maybe I should be thankful that it didn't happen five days before. At least still I have an outside and very small chance that it will heal enough for me to be able to stay competitive throughout the weekend. Who knows. I'll be praying for a miracle. All in all with the set back it was still my best week of training for the year with 102.7 miles covered. Again more treadmill running than I'd like to do but I can't make the ice melt any faster than it is. So my weekly recap looks like this.
Sat - 3.0 mi. AM hill work. :30:00. 6.2 mi. PM trail 53:15.
Sun - 5.54 mi. @work. AM :48:48. 6.0 mi. treadmill. :43:16.
Mon - 8.15 mi. @work. AM 1:28:50. 7.0 mi. treadmill. :49:13.
Tue - 7.50 mi. @work. AM 1:27:12. 5.12 mi. treadmill. :38:09.
Wed - 6.2 trail. 1:12:00 (accident) + 18.0 mi. treadmill. 3:00:00.
Thu - 20.0 treadmill. 3:00:00.
Fri - 4 mi. @work. AM. :44:12. 6.0 mi. PM. treadmill 1:00:00.
Weekly Total: 102.71 miles. / 16:14:55 hr/min/sec...
Great week except for the damn fall. Wish I would've seen that one coming. I hope everyone is staying upright in their trail endeavours and staying injury free.
