Derailed

Only temporarily, I hope.

I mentioned in my last post that I was going to have to be off my feet for a while. Don't worry, nothing horrible happened to me -- I just hurt myself. I had been noticing a bit of discomfort around the ankle and top of my left foot for the last couple of weeks, but it was more annoying than painful. Well, this past Saturday, I ran in a 5K cross-country race at a local camp. The good news is that I placed first in my age group in 29:40, was the second female finisher, and finished about 2 minutes faster than last summer. However, the course was really rough (3.1 miles over very rutty cow pasture and wooded trails) and after the race, I could barely walk on my left foot. I spent most of the rest of the weekend with my foot on ice, then went to my podiatrist on Monday morning. I was really concerned that I had fractured a bone in my foot, but was elated to learn I only strained the muscle. The doctor taped my foot and told me to take ibuprofen to reduce the inflammation. While I am not yet back to running, I am almost walking without a limp now, and it's only been 5 days. Yay!

Because I still haven't given up on running a half marathon this fall, I'm trying to make up for the runs I've been missing by doing cross-training activities. So far this week, I've cycled on a stationary bike twice, and plan to hit the pool on Saturday for my first attempt at pool running. Basically, you put on a flotation belt, jump in the water, and start running in place (feet not touching bottom). I'm shooting for about 80 minutes -- about the same amount of time it would take me to run the 8 miles I had planned to run on Saturday. It may be harder than it sounds though, and I'll probably look ridiculous doing it. Oh, well. We'll see how it goes!