The Marrakesh Half Marathon was a great experience but Monday (26th Jan) started pretty well how I expected - with a sore knee. The whole day was spent traveling back to Sheffield with a 4 hour flight from Morocco followed by a 3 hour drive from Stansted. No time or appetite for running really.
I couldn't bear to even look at my marathon training plan (and still haven't) so I am not sure what I was supposed to be doing. But whatever it was, I wasn't doing it. I was driving up the motorway with the ache in my left knee telling me that my chances of doing well at London were passing as fast as the traffic on the other side of the A1.
On Tuesday, I woke up with hardly any knee pain at all and I started to pull myself together. This is going to get better I told myself. I had been doing my quad and stability exercises pretty religiously and definitely felt stronger. But what was I going to do about my fading fitness and speed endurance whilst I waited?
I went through the list of things that caused the pain and, I suspected, would prolong the injury: long runs, running downhill, smacking the tarmac. I then went through the list of things that would help the injury get better: active recovery, massage, exercises, enough protein, no booze. I then went through the options I could try to stay fit - cycling, cross-training, maybe even running uphill? I processed all this in my head during Tuesday and by the end of the day I was jogging one mile (uphill) to rejoin the S10 gym, which is basically at the back of my house.
My session was pretty obvious given my situation - tape the knee up for extra support, warm up and down on the bike to get the knee nice and loose without knocking it about, attempt to run uphill for a few miles on the treadmill, but plan to move to the cross-trainer if the pain got above 3/10. The session went well and whilst the treadmill was tedious as hell, I was actually running with only a very dull ache. I knocked out a pretty quick 5 miles on a 2% incline at around 6:20 pace. I was tempted to carry on, but decided that I had probably tested enough for the day. I did my exercises that evening with a new determination. Might just be able to pull this round...
I woke on Wednesday feeling good and whilst I got a couple of flickers of pain as I walked downhill to work, I was pretty confident that I had got a recovery plan that might work: carry on with the exercises, stay on the inclines but gradually reduce the gradient down to flat, introduce more road miles as things get better. Be prepared for it to take weeks. I jogged to the gym again, warmed everything up on the bike a bit, and then hit the treadmill for a 9 mile run. I set the incline to 2% again, and the pace to about 6:40 knowing that this would feel easy at first, but reasonably testing towards the end. Jesus, the miles passed slowly, but, again, only a dull ache in the knee. Definitely feeling better.
On Thursday, I was due to have my left, rearmost molar tooth out. And to my surprise the dental hospital phoned me and offered me an appointment earlier in the day. The dentists had got to work, but loads of patients had cancelled because of 'the snow'. Somewhat obsessively, I realised that this meant I could get the tooth out, spend a couple of hours recovering, and then hit the treadmill again.
After 30 minutes of feeling like someone was trying to pull my jaw away from my skull, the tooth was out and I was waiting for the bleeding to stop. The dentist went through some ground rules for the next 48 hours: no alcohol (shame), no chewing on that side (no shit), no mouth-washing until day 2 (errrm, OK), no smoking for rest of day (no issue), no vigorous exercise for 48 hours (what!!!) I tried to explain that I was marathon training but my protestations were met with blank looks. I walked home in a bit of a post-traumatic daze.
As it happened, the pain that hit a couple of hours later meant I am not sure I could have run that day anyway. Some runner friends confirmed that their insistence on running after having their teeth out had not ended prettily. Apparently the blood pumping hard round your veins can dislodge the bloodclot and... I'll stop there.
The tooth had healed by Saturday morning though and I hit the gym for a cheeky 45 minute session between dropping Lola off at music academy and picking Isla up from a sleepover. I warmed up and set my fresh legs at a short 5-mile progression run on a 4% incline. I pushed the last mile or so hard at around 5:20 pace (equivalent to 5:00 pace on the flat). I felt properly refreshed by the session. And, the knee was fine. Maybe the enforced two day break had been a good idea anyway.
I managed to squeeze in a 6 mile recovery run on Saturday evening - dropping the incline to 3%. And Sunday followed a similar pattern to Saturday with a reasonably hard 5-mile fartlek session in the morning (gradually increasing the base pace whilst holding the fast pace at around 6:20 on a 4% incline) with an easy recovery in the evening. Sunday evening was pizza night with the kids, watching 'The Voice'. And for the first time in a couple of weeks, I felt like I was training again.
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