Week 14 - This Week Had 31 Days

I wasn't sure how to title this post.  I kept coming back to a Canadian TV show that I've seen a few times, "This Hour Has 22 Minutes".  You see back in the old days before YouTube, a half hour TV show included about 8 minutes of commercials and much like a little kid waiting for the conclusion to a Scooby Doo cartoon the commercials seemed to redefine the concept of space and time.  Will this week ever end?  Can I actually find a way to put 10 pounds in a 5 pound bag?  No, but I'll be damned  if it didn't feel like it.


Way back a lifetime ago, the end of last week on Sunday brought drama.  I hurt my Achilles.  Amanda crashed on her first bike ride and wound up in urgent care looking for broken bones.  By Monday morning my ankle had calmed down enough where it seemed clear that it was likely just a flare up of the tendinosis of my hallucis longus tendon.  Nothing to see here.  Please move along.  Not much drama, just need to get back to doing physical therapy and all will be well.  Tuesday morning I had zero pain in my ankle.  No problems at all.  Nothing new, nothing old.  Everything was fine.  Bullet dodged.  10 miles on the treadmill @7:53 (pronounced "couch pace") was on tap.  Cool.  I did a half mile warm up and then some stretching.  Everything felt great.  I was pleasantly surprised that the YouTube app on the treadmill would play the 2016 Women's Olympic Triathlon event.  Usually, videos of the Olympics are blocked on the treadmill.  I settled in and was looking forward to the bizarre run shootout between Gwen Jorgensen and Nicola Spirig.  It was going to be a good morning.  4 miles into the run I started to feel some discomfort in my Achilles again.  Hmm, that's unexpected.  I kept running and decided that 8 miles would be just as good as 10 miles.  I got about 4.6 or 4.7 miles in and now the Achilles was showing real pain.  Crap.  I cut it off at 5 miles to do some stretching, foam rolling, etc. to get back on the right side of this hiccup.  I was limping when I walked.  I could feel the Achilles attachment in my heel with every step.  I didn't seem tight when I was stretching, but I did a lot of foam rolling to move things along quicker.  The walk to the locker room, I was really starting to limp a lot.  Ruh Roh.  I got undressed to hit the shower and there was purple patch on my Achilles above where my shoe stopped that stretched on for about 3 inches.  Purple skin?  Pain while walking?  Yeah, I f'd up good this time.  I limped into work and about an hour later I went to put an over the counter brace on my ankle and the purple patch was gone.  That made no sense.  Many hours, and two doctor's visits later, I came to the conclusion that the purple patch was irritation from the foam roller.  Oops.

In the Penalty Boot

I'm aggressive in the way I train, but I also try to be aggressive about how I take care of problems when they show up.  My first call was to a chiropractor that works extensively with athletes.  He does great soft tissue work.  He wouldn't be able to get me in for 6 days though.  I called my primary care doc and he could get me in the same morning.  I gave him the background and he offered to refer me to an orthopedist for appropriate splinting, order an MRI, both or nothing.  Both please!  As he was filling out the paperwork, he said he was going to mark the orthopedist as urgent.  This bothered me.  Was it really urgent?  I was in pain, but I came in without crutches.  In the end, he kept the referral with the urgent declaration and I'm glad he did.  I was able to get into a nurse practitioner the same day.  She listened to my symptoms and with the sympathy of someone that is almost certainly a fellow runner she told me that I had to stop running.  I asked about swim and bike.  She said 'no'.  I think she expected more of a reaction from me.  I accepted it without any resistance.  They fit me for a boot with orders to wear it as much as possible for 3 weeks.  Uh, 3 weeks?  That might be a problem, but OK, I'll play along for now.  I had "self healed" in 2 days well enough to run 4.5 miles with zero symptoms.  It seems impossible this will take 3 weeks to heal.

Prophylactic Weight Lifting Gloves
and now the Y has been shut down

Wednesday morning I went to the Y and did some upper body weight lifting.  It felt good, but I couldn't help but start thinking about every barbell I touched and the fact that people will wipe down benches but we never wipe down the stuff that our hands touch.  The coronavirus became real for us in the Rochester NY area.  There was a confirmed local case.  It was someone that had just flown back from Rome, Italy and then taken a 6 hour bus ride from NYC to Rochester.  Ruh Roh.  The buzz with my running friends, both online and local, was becoming loud talking about what races would be cancelled or postponed.  I assumed the Boston Marathon was going to get cancelled, but figured the Two Rivers Marathon in Pennsylvania would be on.  This is the race where I was originally going to pace a friend for her first BQ, but now I was going to run as a fast half marathon.  The Two Rivers Marathon was 2 1/2 weeks away.  It was a small race.  There is no way it was going to get cancelled, or at least that is what I thought at the time.  I was wrong.  The plan at the time since the timeline to get ready for the race didn't play well with a 3 week sentence in the penalty boot was to be good and stay booted for a little more than 1 week at which point I would have the MRI results back.  If the MRI doesn't show any new damage then I would do a test run.  If the test run doesn't hurt I would do a 10 day fast taper and then go crush 13.1.  The Two Rivers Marathon course is fast.  I really think I could have had a shot at going 1:22 or 1:23 there even though that sounds like crazy talk.

Thursday morning (perceived week 3? 4? in this story) got off to an interesting start.  I was taking the first of several rest days.  I own some rental houses and have been working with a fellow that has fallen on hard times.  After 6 months of trying to give him a helping hand I had no choice but pay lawyers to go to court and get an eviction order.  The eviction was granted Tuesday evening, but I expected he was still going to be at the house.  I drove by several times after the eviction order, including at 5am one morning and could find no evidence that he was still living there.  I stopped at Home Depot on the way into work to get new locks.  If he wasn't there Thursday evening and some of his key possessions were gone I was going to take possession of the property.  When I was in line at Home Depot, my jaw dropped open.  There was a woman in line ahead of me with every square inch of her shopping cart loaded with toilet paper.  The stack was 5 1/2 feet tall.  She couldn't see to push the cart.  SMH.  Really?  Is this where we are?  Yep.  In between work and trying to get some last minute armageddon supplies for my family, races started dropping like flies.  The Runnin' of the Green 5 miler (a.k.a Not-Johnny's) was cancelled.  Really?  I mean, it was "good" for me.  I was signed up but couldn't run in the boot and was actively fighting the urge to race it anyway.  But, really?  This is a pretty big race with 2,000 or so people most years, but really?  This is Rochester NY.  This kind of thing doesn't happen here.  I understand it, I just can't comprehend it?  I know that last sentence doesn't make sense.  What is happening in my community doesn't make any sense.

Thursday and Friday are a blur.  I don't remember what was cancelled when, but in addition to The Runnin' of the Green 5 miler (a.k.a Not-Johnny's) the Two Rivers Marathon was cancelled and The Boston Marathon rescheduled to September.  Even work was "cancelled" on Friday when I got word that everyone in our office is now on mandatory work from home.

Best.  Race.  Ever.

I'm so very blessed to have great running friends online and in real life to go through this with.  A couple of those friends, Rae and Greg were planning to have a housewarming party after the local 5 mile race on Saturday before COVID-19 invaded our community feeling like an alien spaceship hovering on the horizon.  It was a relief that they decided to go ahead with the gathering and with so many races being cancelled there was only one way to start this party off right.  A 5 mile race.  Rae launched The Dirty Leprechaun 5 miler.  I was declared the timing judge.  With a small field of 4 runners of varied abilities this race needs some extra spice so we decided to make it a bracket race.  I wrote up the rules and we had a blast.  If you aren't familiar with a bracket race what makes them the best is that every runner gets a handicap such that anyone could win regardless of their speed.  I hope you take a minute to read the rules.  I had a fun time writing them and even more fun enforcing them.  I may have to write a race report for this one later in the week even though I did not compete.  In the meantime...

The Dirty Leprechaun official results:

WINNERS
1st Place - Greg, 43:00 prediction, 43:03.74 actual
2nd Place - Marcus, 27:00 prediction, 29:26.44 actual

LOSERS
1st of the Worst - Matt, 45:00 prediction, 44:51.45 actual
2nd of the Worst - Rae, 42:00 prediction, 39:34.85 actual

You are all the best!

This race and the party that followed turned out to be exactly what we needed at just the right time.  With the COVID-19 aliens on the verge of opening the doors and changing our lives it was great to have such wonderful company as we enter the brave new world.  We even managed to keep the size of the party to a public health appropriate size, even if the amount of alcohol consumed was a wonderfully bad decision.  Or was it?  Alcohol is a sanitizer right?

Lesson Learned?  Don't challenge my wife to a game of hide and seek after she has been drinking!

Clean it?  Nah.
Replace it

We still aren't done with the week.  The eviction I mentioned earlier in this post still needs to be addressed.  Gaining possession of this property and the extreme amounts of work it is going to need has been my very own Sword of Damocles.  I've known this is coming for a while and with a high training volume and a full time day job it doesn't seem like there is any way that I can fit in the hundreds of hours of work that will be needed before I can have this place ready for a new tenant.  It feels like a regression back to my "couch" days, but it isn't.  I just need to be an adult for a while, just don't tell the orthopedist that I ditched the boot so that I could work unencumbered.  It felt like a risk and there were times where I kept wondering if it was a bad idea but I think I made it through without making anything worse.  The penalty boot will continue to be on 24/7 for the next few days until I get the MRI results and figure out what comes next.  Fingers crossed!

Weekly Stats

Swim - 0 yards
Bike - 0 miles
Run - 5 miles
Body Pump - 0 times
Heavy Lifting - 2 times
Duration - 2:14 hours

Physical Therapy - 0 times

Body Composition

Weight - N/A pounds
%Fat - N/A
%Water - N/A
%Muscle - N/A

Overall Plan and Progress