Oopsie (Or A Mild Injury Scare)

I should really figure out how to stop falling down when I run one of these days.

I went out for an evening run last week and while I thought my headlamp was bright enough, I still managed to miss a rock, tripped, and fell down. Hard. I stand up and take a look at my knee and it appears there’s a new hole there. I glance away thinking that can’t be right. I look back, stare long, and it sure looks like an opening in my flesh, however blood’s not pumping out of it or anything. I’m pretty sure that happens when new holes suddenly appear in our bodies. My light isn’t perfect and the angle staring down at my leg isn’t great, but it’s good enough to see what shouldn’t be there. And if my eyesight was faulty, the pain radiating from my knee confirmed that things weren’t 100%.

Thankfully, this happened about a quarter mile into my run so I turned around and limped back home. As I shuffled back, I periodically looked down and now I saw a little bit of blood coming out. More a thin trickle than the usual steady stream that I’m accustomed to. I was able to get the wound washed out and bandaged up without any issues.

The knee itself was very sore for the first day and then rather stiff for the next couple days. I decided to take things extra easy and only did my minimum mile run for the next couple days. Even though I was not pushing things in the slightest, my pace picked up a little over the second half of each mile as my knee loosened up. This was a huge relief off my mind as it told me I wasn’t injured injured. That it was just a little tweak. A niggle if you will.

The injury scare occurred at an inopportune time (like there’s ever a good time – lol). I was just starting to ramp up my mileage ahead of Devil Dog. I was hoping to get three weeks in the 40-60 mile range with a long run one of the weekends, however one of those weeks is now lost and I’m wondering how much to do with a weak knee. My thoughts are to err on the side of caution as it’s not like I need to improve my fitness at this point.

When to End a Streak

If I’m going to be cautious, then I need to scrap my long run, too. This would result in me not having a 20 mile or longer run during the month of November. This would be the first time in five years that I’ve not gotten in at least one long run. The last month without one was October 2019 or 60 months ago. In a lot of ways, I’ve been more proud of this streak than my daily run streak (4,488 days and counting). A mile is nothing anymore, however 20 miles is still a long freaking way to run no matter how many ultras I’ve finished.

The difficulty for me with this decision is that I’m 90%+ sure that I could get it done without causing any problems. Maybe 95%+. And if something did happen to pop up, I would still have two weeks to get my knee back to 100%. Even though I’m telling myself this, something is whispering in my subconscious: don’t do it. Do the smart thing. I don’t know if I’m getting better at listening to my body the more I run or I’m more willing to rely on my massive endurance base to get me through. As with everything in life, it’s probably a combination of the two.

So I’m going to kick back and relax a bit over the next couple weeks. At least I can wake up at 5am for a run again. Baby steps I guess.