Tuesday will mark three weeks since I did something (a tear most likely) to my left calf. Annoyingly it was a predictable injury, more or less self inflicted. I've been somewhat gung-ho with my training in recent months — running 'doubles' 2 or 3 days a week to reach my mileage target of around 80 kilometres per week. On Tuesday 6 March I ran a double of 8k and 7k after doing a double on the Monday. The second run on the Tuesday was a race — The Boathouse 5k and my calf felt a little tight warming up. It was uncomfortable in the early stages of the race (I should have stopped!) but at 3.8k it suddenly cramped and I was forced to walk slowly to the finish.
This is exactly the same injury I suffered in March of 2016, ironically towards the finish of the ACT Masters' 5000m Championships. My calf 'went' with 2 laps to go but I managed to run painfully to the finish. My mistake in the aftermath of the injury was not giving it enough time to heal before resuming a gradual return to running. I gave it a day, then a week, then another week, then two weeks etc. Never enough time. Eventually I took six weeks off, which was enough for full recovery.
After three weeks off the calf feels pretty good, although it was a little tender on Friday following a test run/walk on the grass track on Thursday. I'm hopeful of resuming running soon. Unfortunately I missed the ACT Masters' 5000m Championships race that I was targeting. I think I could have run around 23 minutes. Ann (2 minutes ahead of me in the 10k) ran 22:15, Helen 22:58, Roger 23:01 and Kathy 23:16. It would have been good to have been in a race with the latter three. That would have been fun. Now it's back to the drawing board, which will be a plan based on volume of around 55 km per week of running — better in terms of scheduling recovery days.
A cool evening for the Masters' 5000m Championships
