Trading Places

This past month, I have been busy healing and getting back to training. I wore the boot for about 10 days while I wasn’t swimming or water running. Once I was released from the dreaded boot, I started riding my bike on the trainer and after several days was able to start riding outside again. Training was busier than ever while I was rehabbing my shin. At first, when my training schedule had a run, I water ran for that amount of time. Once I was able to start biking again, I biked everyday in addition to my regular swim workouts. Running is much less time consuming than getting to the pool to water run or dealing with the bike, so my recovery time was pretty hectic.

Finally, after 18 days, I was allowed to run one mile. It was on the same day that Mike and I were supposed to run a small half marathon about an hour north of here. It was a gorgeous fall morning, so Mike went to the race and I headed to a soft trail to do my run. When I got back to the car after my 10 minutes of glory, I was relieved and excited. My shin didn’t hurt at all and I felt like a huge weight had been lifted off of me. I checked my phone before I started the short drive home and noticed that Mike left a message just a few minutes before. This is weird because that would mean he was calling me when he should be half way through his race. Not good. He left me a voice mail message saying that he had been having a great race but fell and hurt his ankle. I called him back and after some discussion, we decided to meet up at home and then drive to the orthopedic clinic together.

It didn’t take long for the x-ray to come back with the verdict that he had broken his fibula. In the end, it turned out that there was no ligament damage and that the bone was still aligned, but it was definitely broken. Sure enough, they brought out his own personal boot and some crutches to go along with it. Here he is all outfitted with his new medical equipment:

No sooner had I made it out of the boot and back to running and now Mike is out with a broken leg. His break occurred 7 weeks before Ironman Florida. The earliest healing time would be 6 weeks, so it’s going to be close. They will do an x-ray next week and that will give us a better idea of the rate of healing. The good thing is that when a bone is healed, it’s healed. So if it’s done healing in 6 weeks than doing the Ironman won’t hurt it, unlike a ligament which would have scar tissue and would be easily re-injured. Right now he’s being patient and waiting for the x-ray. If that goes well, then he will get to swim and start spinning on the bike. With now only 5 weeks until the race, hopefully he can still get some time in the pool and out on the bike before race day. He’s run 20 marathons and done Ironman 3 times, so he has a great base of fitness to go into the race even without any more running before race day. It isn’t ideal, but given how much training has already gone into this event, it would be great if he could at least get out there and enjoy the day.

So we have traded places. I’m back to training and after slowly adding running miles back, I’m caught up to my regular schedule and feeling pretty good. Now that it’s getting so close to the race, the training days are crazy long. Weekdays have 2-3 hours of training each day and the weekends are very long. I know what it feels like to be out with an injury while everyone else is out doing there thing, so I won’t complain about the long days. There are just 3 more crazy weekends and then 2 weekends of taper before November 3rd. Hopefully Mike will be back at it soon and we’ll be ready for the big day- it wouldn’t be the same without my guy out on the course with me!