Last weekend was a bad day for me, not only did I disappoint myself I let my country down. I find it tough having a bad run but this is feeling is amplified 10 fold when running for GB. I guess you could say it wasn’t a bad run as such because of the circumstances. The race was 4 laps of 2km and feeling good after the first lap I moved into a position near the front of the field and made an effort to cover a break from the 2 leaders. Around 400m into the 2nd lap I slipped on one of the corners, I somehow managed to stay on my feet and I carried on running thinking how the hell did I not go down there? I lost around 10m or so but got back into my running however once the adrenaline wore off I soon realised my back wasn’t feeling so good. I was feeling pain just above the butt cheek and my left hamstring seemed to have lost power. I didn’t contemplate dropping out, I just knew I had to get to the finish at all costs. I dropped out of race in the summer and I hated myself for it, I think it took me about 3 weeks to get over that feeling so unless my leg falls off you won’t see me taking an early bath from  a race ever again.

Because it was a GB team event there was medical help on hand and Toby Smith was very good in assessing and treating the injury. I had inflamed the lumbar of my back and this had aggravated the left hamstring. He treated the injury with acupuncture and soft tissue massage and told me I needed to rest a couple days. He referred to the injury similar symptoms to twisting an ankle so the rest was needed to allow the inflammation to go down. I took Sunday off then went for a 10min jog on Monday and it didn’t feel too bad. On Tuesday John and I both agreed it it has improved good enough to do a couple of easy runs then an hour on Wednesday morning. All went fine so on Thursday I did an 8 mile relaxed tempo with the lads. I felt great doing that, started out relaxed at 5:30′s then progressively got faster doing the last couple miles at 5:00 pace. Warming down is where it all went wrong, my left knee went crazy. I was soon in agony and struggling to walk. Something had tightened up and pulled on the iliotibial band causing pain on the lateral side of my knee.

I didn’t do anything Fri/Sat/Sun apart from get a deep tissue massage on Saturday from Becky Ellis in Loughborough. That seems to have helped and I managed to jog 30mins tonight which I was very happy about. Tomorrow I’m off to Leeds to see physio Alison Rose and hopefully she can work out the route of the problem. I’m down to run Antrim this weekend, I’ve no idea just yet if this will happen but I guess I’ll find out off Alison tomorrow.

The plus side to being injured is that i’ve got a tonne of work done. My web design is going really well at the moment and I’m just finishing off an e-commerce build for cycle shop. I’ve managed to get a lot of hours in over the last 4 days (and nights) however the late nights are not something I want to get used too!