Welcome back to my fitness week update that I share on the Weekly rundown link-up hosted by Kim and Deborah.
This week’s post should perhaps be named “my lack of fitness” week – because I have a new injury and have yet again realised how poor my fitness level apparently is, despite everything I do. Or is it? Am I just unfortunate with injuries? It’s really upsetting and makes me think I should forget about running until ALL my joints have 100% mobility and I KNOW I have sufficient strength. But how would you know?
It makes me wonder what’s so special with me, since other people have started running at 50, without problems. But I refuse to give up.
You remember my brilliant run last Sunday? When I was just metres from home, I started having some odd pain around my heel in the right foot. It wasn’t bad but it got worse during that afternoon/evening. I decided to not worry too much about it but to contact my trainer to have him look at it if possible after the Tuesday training session.
But no matter how much I try to stay positive, I’ve really, really struggled to keep the mood and hope up this week. The disappointment was absolutely overwhelming.
However, the timing wasn’t bad because we’ve had a cold snap this week, with both snow and ice. Eew! So, I wouldn’t have been able to run this week anyway.
Monday
Monday was all about rest and work. My foot was possibly a bit better than the day before but definitely not good. I had a conversation with my PT.
Tuesday
Gym day. The snow had actually stuck to the ground and the drive to town was quite unpleasant. I don’t know about you Americans, but we don’t have winter tyres here. I understand how Irish people are excited about snow because it doesn’t happen a lot here, but I’m certainly NOT excited about it! Give me green fields and plus degrees all the winter please!
In the gym, we discussed a lot of things around injuries and I wondered whether I had done something wrong , The answer was that there is no easy answer. The only thing I can do is to keep training.
Some heavy lifting always makes things better.
- I tried lunges with barbell, but had too much pain in the right foot when I shifted leg.
- Squats, barbell 35 kgs. This went well and was pain-free.
- Push-ups, body weight, 1 set from bench and 2 sets on floor
- Chest press with barbell, 25 kgs
- Dumbbell row, 12,5 kg
- Barbell bent-over row, 22,5 kgs
- Shoulder shrugs with 12,5 or 15 kg dumbbells (I actually don’t remember exactly which)
- Shoulder front raise, 6 kg dumbbells
And then, assessment of my foot. I got massage and trigger point treatment on both feet and lower legs, and more physiotherapy exercises to do at home. It turns out I have reduced ankle mobility and I need to do more to prevent developing plantar fasciitis. This old body! I’ll need to get up earlier in the morning just to have the time to do all my physiotherapy! It could actually be a very pleasant start of the day. And it’s better to be active, have fitness ambitions and discover all of these problems (and work on them), than to give up and be a couch potato.
So what’s with the foot? At least nothing obviously awful. Probably something to do with overcompensation because of poor mobility? I just call it the mysterious foot injury. The only good thing is that the more we know about my weaknesses, the more I can get targeted training. But how do I get back to running after this, when I don’t know what went wrong?! We’ll see.
But I’ll do everything I need to do to try to reach my goal to be a runner, because running simply makes me happy.
Wednesday
Nothing else than work, Italian class and physiotherapy for feet, ankles and elbows.
Thursday
I started the day with physiotherapy. All of it, feet, ankles, hips, elbows, rotator cuffs, and I added leg raises, glute bridges, both the usual and the single leg one, and another exercise for the glutes and legs.
I got some good work done today – I could finally publish the new camera club website I’ve been working on for a long time! It was a wonderful feeling to get that done. I also played some concertina and made progress with some tunes. The slow music session in the evening was lovely. If you have no idea what this is (which may be the case for most not-music-people especially outside Ireland or possibly England), it’s a session where we meet to play and learn new tunes at a slower speed than what is done in regular trad music sessions, and it’s a life-saver for my concertina playing.
Friday
My mood, self-confidence, and hope about getting back to running were at an all-time low, and I was miserable, but I had a good training session after all.
- Step-ups
- Bulgarian squats – no weights (it went better than usual)
- Flyes, 7 kgs
- Chest press, barbell 22,5 kgs
- Parachute on mat
- Tricep pullovers, dumbbells 6 kgs
- Stand-up row, barbell 17,5 kgs
- Lateral raise, 5 kg dumbbells
As always, my trainer helped me try to think rationally and did his best to encourage me. Poor man, having to listen to my misery for an hour.
While I was in the gym, my husband bought me a balance board to help strengthen my feet and ankles. (and core, and much more!)
Bless them both!
I was able to boost myself a little during the afternoon and started preparing a new work project I’ve been thinking about, plus continued planning projects for my portfolio. The evening was fabulous – before dinner I took up the guitar, played some tunes and tried a new song I’m learning. It really helped get my mood back on track and we had a fantastic music session later in the pub. I even felt my concertina playing went quite well.
Saturday
The weather was back to ordinary Irish weather, oh joy! Even if fog and drizzle isn’t particularly inspiring, 10 degrees is fantastic. And the foot seemed somewhat better… so who could resist my husband suggestion to go for a walk? Not me!
After a week in misery, I think my oomph is back, and I needed to get moving. Since we have steep hills all around us and I didn’t want to start my almost-post-injury walking up and down hills, we took the car to the nearest flat area that offers some nice walking trails.
And, I may envy all you people who are able to run without getting injuries, but but but… we have signs of SPRING!
We play music in another pub most Saturday nights, just the two of us, and it was a good night, with more people than usual at this time of the year, because of some events. A friend of ours showed up and sang a few songs and we had a good chat.
Sunday
A nice self-care and bodyweight strength session! I started with some stretches of glutes, legs and lower back. After my training on Friday, I realised that step-ups is a quite powerful exercise, however simple it may seem. I was sore in leg muscles I can’t remember being sore before.
I did a very pleasant workout session of mainly legs and core.
Two variants of glute bridges, then lunges, sumo squats, plank and alternating plank, push-ups, leg raises and back extensions. I finished off with my usual physiotherapy. I really enjoyed this session.
This afternoon we’re going to town to join in a new music session that started last week, in a pub that closed down but reopened with new owners. It was very pleasant last week and I’m sure it’ll be a good time and a good end of the week.
Now for next week I’ll keep up all this good work and another challenge I apparently need to work more on is the mental one – I can’t let setbacks like this foot injury get me down as it did this week. I think there was more to it than just the injury, but my usual strategy to stop negative thinking didn’t work so I need a plan B – and I have one in mind already.
How was your week? Have you had seemingly random injuries? How did you plan coming back to running?
I hope you are doing well. I’m joining the Weekly rundown link-up with Kim and Deborah.
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