.Injuries

I am what I think you could call "accident-prone". My first (and only) major injury doing gymnastics was a sprained ankle, and I did that doing a simple round-off (essentially, a cartwheel with oomph and landing on two feet) the day before one of the biggest competitions of my gymnastics career. My dad took me to the medi-center after practice where the doctor told me I shouldn't compete the next day. My response: "Oh, I'm competing. Tell me what I can do to make it through." I ended up taking all the elements of difficulty out of my routines and completed everything but vault; I even placed 7th on beam out of the 20 competitors! I'm sure the other girls were just shaking their heads as I hobbled up to get my ribbon.

Most of my major injuries have come by accident, or plain stupidity. In 2012 while playing slo-pitch with my company team, a ball from another field came over the dugout and hit me in the face while I was playing first base. The ball broke and shattered my nose and I needed 3 stitches, but thankfully I came out of that without a concussion or anything more severe. Then last summer, again playing slo-pitch, I jumped to catch a ball that was overthrown to me at first base. When I landed, I landed half on the base and half on the ground, so my ankle rolled and I ended up spraining my ankle quite badly (to be quite honest, I can't even remember which ankle I sprained the first time, so it may have been the same one I did as a gymnast, I'm not sure! This sprain was much worse though, and I spent 3 hours in emergency for them to suit me up with crutches and give me some T3's). Being on crutches for almost 2 weeks was definitely not fun, especially because my house has a lot of stairs, and I was headed to Stella & Dot's national conference in Las Vegas in 10 days!

The trip ended up going very well, people were so nice and helped me get food and such when it was a buffet, and I was able to get early entrance into our conferences so I could get a good seat without worrying about getting trampled in the crowd! Thankfully, I also went to physio and was able to train and successfully complete a half marathon less than two months later - and hit a new personal best while I was at it!

It's every athletes nightmare to get injured or sick; it puts a dead stop to training and when you're in the groove, it can sometimes it can be very hard to get that motivation back. That's kind of how I feel right now. The last few weeks, I've been making an effort to run and work out more, and then last sunday playing ball hockey I pulled a groin muscle (I know it sounds dumb, but I didn't even realize a girl could do that. Apparently I should have paid more attention in my anatomy class in university). After being in pain the first day, in the days following the pain started to subside to the point where 4 days later, I didn't feel it anymore. Unfortunately on Wednesday I started to get sick and caught a nasty cold that's been going around, so that kept me couch bound for a few days as well. I had contemplated going for a run yesterday, but then the weather gods decided to make it snow here in Edmonton (and I don't run much in the winter; more about that in a future post). It was probably for the better; I went dancing last night for my friend Sheena's birthday and I felt a little bit of pain while dancing, but not while walking. I went to play ball hockey today and realized damn, the stupid pain is still there. It's just in a different spot than when I started!

I had high hopes for this week including an early morning work out tomorrow, November Project on Wednesday and Friday, bootcamp Tuesday and Thursday, and some runs on the weekend. I was going to start it off easy since I had to take a week off, and see how the week went. Now it looks like I'll be spending the week with an ice pack! I'm trying to think of the positives though, as there is still 6 weeks until my first races of the season, so I still have lots of time to prepare. In reading a couple running blogs, I've also found out that there are other runners out there who do double runs in one day, so I'm not the only crazy one! (I will be running a 15K and a 10K on June 14th, both for different charities. They are both close to my heart so I couldn't choose - I'm hoping next year they will be on different weekends!)

Tomorrow starts a new week! As per my friend Debbie's advice, I may look into some yin yoga this week to help stretch everything out. Fingers crossed!

xo
-Dianne