February Training: My First Overuse Injury in 2 Years

Writing training logs is never easy when training isn’t going well. Although, I should be used to it now as my training hasn’t been great since 2018. It’s not as if my training is terrible but I haven’t been close to PRs in the last few years. My body hasn’t wanted to run fast between injury, moving, the pandemic, and life.

At the end of February, I got my first over use injury in the last 2 years. One overuse injury wouldn’t be terrible but it came on the heals of falling and hurting my hamstring in November. So it’s pretty much two back to back injuries. Thankfully nothing is broken, but who wants to be injured?

Long story short, a week or so ago, my peroneal tendon became inflamed. I was doing a track workout, and I felt it start to get hot. Over the last week, I’ve gotten it aggressively treated because I didn’t want to travel back to the east coast for 3 weeks on a bum ankle (also, I would *really* like to be a part of Shamrock weekend in 2 weeks). It’s definitely helped improved recovery time.

The peroneal tendon take anywhere from 2-6 weeks to clear up. Last time I tried to run on that I got a calcaneus stress fracture. Now that I’m two years older and wiser, I rest. Luckily I can swim and swimming is going fairly well. In fact I just swam my fastest 500 since college (6:30).

For training, you can always you can follow me on Strava.

February Recap:

Miles run: 243

Races: Surf City Half Marathon Recap (1:36.49)

Boney Mountain Trail Half Marathon (2:38)

Workouts: 5

Swimming: 35.8 miles

Thoughts:

I would love to tell you that it was just getting injured that made the month mediocre but it started with the Surf City Half Marathon. I rarely have stomach issues (in fact in 500 races, I can count roughly 5 times), but something did not agree with my stomach that day. I felt good until I didn’t. After that race, it took a couple of weeks to feel almost normal. The Boney Trail Race was fun, and I enjoyed doing a trail race.

Before Surf City (so the first few days of February), workouts seemed to be going well. I was feeling better. I ran a 6:31 mile and felt good. But alas, February was not my month of training.

Swimming: As mentioned swimming is going well. I’m training for a meet in Palm Springs in early April and I’m feeling good about it so far. Hopefully as I’m away I’ll be able to keep swimming. I’m lucky to swim with a friend a few times a week who is significantly faster than me. I truly forgot how fun it to swim with people.

I think the combination of swimming with Form Goggles and friends has made me want to swim more. I rarely endorse a product so much, but Form Goggles have helped me find the joy of swimming again. I love not counting laps or having workouts to do.

What’s in Store for March?

I’ll be on the East Coast for a good portion of the month. My brother gets married in Florida then I’m heading up to Virginia, followed by New Jersey. I’m looking forward to seeing friends and hopefully getting healthy in time for Shamrock.