Stuck in injury hell :/

Injuries suck! We’ve all had them and we all deal with them differently. Historically my method to cope has been to sulk and eat copious amounts of the highest density calorific food I can find. I wish I was exaggerating. I’m currently mid-sulk as I struggle to recover from a heel injury I picked up two weeks before my first backyard ultra now totalling a very long couple of months ago. I’m bloating fast! – so it’s time to tackle my stupid lizard brain and halt the damage I’ve already caused!

This heel injury has been diagnosed as two things, one being an achilles strain at the insertion into the heel and another is damage to the fat pad in the heel, topped off with a discovery of a bone spur which may or may not be irritating things along the way. The worst part of all of this was I did this on my last ‘long’ run of a training block before tapering for Krayzie’s Backyard Ultra. If I’d got through that run unscathed I may have avoided this injury altogether as the next couple of weeks were very light.

I’m quite sure I know how this happened and the gutting part is I caused it. I was doing a lot of road running in all terrain shoes and not road shoes for a starter. This road running stuff was new to me as I prefer to be on the trails but I was on a first programme with my sparkly new coach Sam Harvey and the best way for him to get data about me was if I’m on the flat, and even better if I’m on the roads. I SHOULD have gone to road shoes earlier but I was already breaking the bank with this sport – funnily enough ‘going for a run’ has turned into an expensive exercise – I’ll do a post on that one day! I SHOULD have limited my time running on highways which have a steep camber and put a lot of extra load onto the foot I damaged. I SHOULD have had my weight lower, no point carrying around the moobs and the muffin top if i’m putting this much time into training.

This collection of awesome choices have now left me on the sidelines and the FOMO is huge. I had awesome races planned which I couldn’t afford but would have found a way. The podiums I was targeting to get closer to now feel so far away that I feel totally removed from the sport. I punish myself further by going on Strava to give Kudos to the awesome people I follow doing lots of awesome things – that used to be me! I ran 127km only 6 weeks ago with this injury at Krayzie’s Backyard Ultra but it feels like a lifetime ago, almost like it wasn’t even me!

I don’t know how long it will be until I’m out there again, but it seems to be anytime I go for a run even as little as 30 minutes, it sets up the rest of the week being in a lot of pain. Walking my dog Fern is my compromise but that is also leaving me limpy! It better not be a long recovery though as it is driving me nuts and all I want to do is run. It’s for my physical health, it’s definitely for my mental health and it gives me the opportunity to be competitive even as I get older, which I enjoy immensely. I want to show that there is no reason why people can’t be competitive in distance running as they get older but currently I’m not doing a great job of showing that.

So what to do? I can hear in my head a few important people in my life give some advice about ‘behave like who you want to be’ and ‘work on all the non-running aspects that can make you stronger’ and they are right. My ‘all’ or ‘nothing’ nature is having a tough time acting like a grown up, and I’m currently in the ‘nothing’ phase. When I’m in my ‘all’ phase I will train hard, eat right, be in shape and sleep well, there is no reason I can’t do all the things besides the ‘train hard’ element and still be in great condition for when I’m healed, but I have a big stupid lizard brain that wants chocolate by the block, trumpets by the box and oreos by the packet. What a heck of a ‘sulk’ this one is! Some consolation is this is the first time the ‘sulk’ has been verbalised and maybe that is the first step to taking some responsibility for this ‘garbage can’ of a carcass I carry around in body form and abuse on the daily!

While this appears to be an incredible amount of ‘woe is me’ in written form, I am still very thankful for my overall health. Too many people I know are dealing with a hell of a lot more than a silly heel injury and I am mindful of that as I write this ‘mega-whinge-fest’. I’m definitely not after sympathy, I know I have it good and I know I shouldn’t take it for granted, however I often feel I do. This article was more to express the frustrations of not being accountable for doing my best while injured and maybe it resonates with others that have felt similar in some regards. Or is this just a ‘me’ thing? Shit!

Do any of you relate to some or all of this? Do you have the magic trick to growing up and leaving ‘sulk’ mode? Drop a message with your words of wisdom!

Run on,

Vaughan