A'bounding

This has been a rather lame 18 months of running since my Auckland Marathon in 2019. A fall and a weird hip/groin strain seemed to hang over 2020 and just when things were looking good, a hamstring niggle stretched into 2021. And then as physio treatment and determination got me going again, an ankle sprain took me from an excellent start to the year to behind the eight-ball once more.

It's over two months since the sprain that still limits me, but being foolhardy, i.e. a hardy fool, I have now strung together two weeks of 50km mileage. 50km is pretty decent mileage when fit and the physios are pretty happy for me to continue with what I'm doing. (Regular movement, stretching and extending movements, getting muscles to work together.) It's all been because of something rather special:  noticeable progress. Prior to the last two weeks, I'd worried that the strategy of being active had backfired and resulted in a slow healing. What changed? A number of things.

Firstly, my physio Claudia pursued a strapping arrangement to lift my arch. This was rather counter-intuitive as I have in-soles which literally hold my arches up. (And have done that well for six marathons!) But the very evening I ran and found that the usual long process of loosening my ankle was absent. And when I removed the strapping days later, it still had some of the benefit. Then I had acupuncture the following week, and a repetition of the same strapping, and again noticed an ease of movement. On Saturday, I ran my farthest run since the sprain, 15km, and stopped on my own terms. (i.e., my ankle didn't compel me to stop.) Then, third and lastly, we finally got back to our favourite Chinese massage place. The masseuse, Betty, an accountant-turned-massage therapist, did some very interesting contortions, which if she had explained them before implementing I would have told her to avoid as I could only imagine them hurting my glass ankle. Strangely these unanticipated twists and squeezes of my Achilles and joints did not hurt at all, and then I ran again today and felt a noticeable freedom that I had not had before.

Seeing progress is a key and now I can see myself running another marathon this year.