It was a silly mistake, turning last week's elation at my misty hill run to frustration at a silly injury. The run itself was OK, some tender muscles; it was the gardening that messed my week up.
Over the last 3 years, we've been slowly turning the garden from a sea of gravel and spindly bushes to what will be a pleasant, pretty flower garden. We're begining to win. The latest phase has been reclaiming a patio corner by digging out an oversized bay tree which hemmed the corner in and isolated it from the garden, and sprucing up the paving and pergola. My knee didn't appreciate standing on a ladder and painting the pergola, and seemed to think the balancing and reaching was some demonic pilates routine. I could feel the area working but not hurting, so I continued the gardening while we had a pleasant day. Bags of sand were luged around and dug in to lighten our claggy clay, and bark spread over flower beds.
The following day I hurt in a "how do I get down the stairs?" kind of way. (The solution being a stiff and lopsided one step at a time approach, feeling somewhat like a fresh zombie). Good job it was a rest day on my plan. Shame the next day turned to a rest day too. The day after I was feeling fairly decent. Good enough to try running in the optimistic hope that working the muscles might ease them out... Wrong! In minutes, I changed my intention to a brisk walk, which ended up being being cut short quite soon.
For Friday, I decided that a visit to the swimming pool was a better idea, so went for a 45min swim. I love swimming as in pounding up and down the pool doing length after length. Unfortunately I can't get to laned sessions, and during the holidays, the regular lanes are removed so the diving pool is avaliable to be ignored, and the rest of the pool becomes a cattle market of lengthers, widthers, splashers and standing-waist-deep-in-tepid-water-chatters. I've never appreciated a swimming pool as a social venue. Anyway, the swim was a successful form of exercise, even if I do get angsty about weaving in and out of people to avoid collisions.
Yesterday, I missed circuits for what is probably the 5th week in a row, mainly because of reclaiming the house from the forces of chaos, two small children and myself, ready for visitors. However, I stuck to plan with some strength work, and successfully tested my knees with a short 15 min run which went well.
Hopefully the injury has passed. It felt more muscular than anything slower to heal. I'll go gently for a couple more days to be safe. As much as I want to keep to plan to do well in this half marathon, that's not going to happen if I push too far while training either.
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