Went to the Yorkshire Clinic yesterday to get the opinion of another physio, and also for the first of my 6 sessions I've booked as part of a package. A nice Irish lad called John was kind enough not to give me any gyp for being 10 minutes late for my 8am appointment (15 minutes to do the last mile of Bingley bloody by-pass!!), then we got through the usual preliminaries fairly quickly as I feel quite an expert on describing my injury - no pain to the touch, sometimes a bit tight coming downstairs, not an over-training injury etc etc.
He agreed with Mike that it's in the Soleus (which I now know to be pronounced with the emphasis on the middle syllable), although he didn't seem as convinced (or indeed concerned) as Mike is that it's in the membrane between them - but the fact of the matter is it's deep, very deep... He felt around and eventually happened upon a very sore bit really deep in the inside of the calf. He then applied "friction" - which is fizzy-talk for battering the hell out of it by massaging sideways across the muscle. It hurt. A lot.
He then applied laser and a heat source to help it heal and gave me some stretches. We've agreed I'll not run til midweek the week after next, which assuming I run on the Wednesday will be 4 1/2 weeks since the injury - that should be plenty of time for it to improve dramatically, and with another 3 or 4 sessions of physio and plenty of stretching I'm now pretty confident I will at least be able to run Coniston 14+ - which if I've managed to get a couple of runs with no pain in I'll probably do as a 20 miler with maybe 8m at sub-3 MP if all feels good. That'll be as good a test as I can as to whether my pace on the day should be 6:50 or 7:20. Back to see John Friday afternoon.
The bad news is no running for another 2 weeks (John actually wanted 3 weeks but that would've meant Coniston would be my first run back) but the good news is that with that rest that will be nearly 5 weeks since the injury, plus lots of physio, laser etc etc. The manipulation John did now means I've got a much better idea where it hurts so I've been able to do some manipulation of my own, and I've been fastidious in my stretching.
So - how do I feel? Ok, actually - I'm confident I'll be doing Blackpool as this treatment plus rest is plenty of time, and confident I can run 3:15, with sub-3 still being a possibility - maybe 3:05 would be a back-up goal. Whatever happens I think I'll need to know before I set off roughly what I'm going for - I don't want to set off to run sub-3 and blow up and end up running 3:20!
Sounds like a good plan and glad to see you are feeling upbeat about it all again. I guess there is no problem doing some cycling too so you will be able to keep the heart and lungs tested over the next few weeks.
ReplyDeleteCheers - I think the fact I'm doing something (as in cycling to keep the CV pumping, stretches and regular physio), along with having a definite target date (I've set myself Weds 24th as my latest date to try a run) means it's not so depressing as just hanging about waiting for it to be better. A guy on RW had 4 weeks off shortly before FLM last year and was going for 2:50 - still ran 2:55!
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