Sprained Relations

Posted by donal on May 26th, 2008 filed in Fitness

Tuesday last, I ran, eh… hobbled, maybe, is a better term, the Dublin Docklands Fun Run. As the name suggests, it’s around the Dublin Docklands. 8km in total, not too far. I hadn’t been doing too much running lately, with pre-exam stress (yeah, I know – a cop-out), exam stress, post-exam stress (ahem… hangover) and then some general lazing. That said, 8km isn’t far, and I was hoping for 36 mins, which I figured was reasonable – 4.5 minutes a kilometer. Of course, to qoute Robert Burns, “The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry”.

It’s prettier in person. How it happened is after the break…

Now, I’ve been running in the same trainers for a fair while now, over a year. I must have put in close to a thousand kilometers in them, including a marathon. So they were pretty worn, coming apart at the seams and with a sole as thin as the last pancake in a batch. I figured I’d buy a new pair, a nice pair of asics, since I’ve been hearing good things about that brand. Being the internet junky that I am, I decided to buy online. Yeah, I know, not a good choice for running shoes, but I bought them from Elvery’s through buy4now anyway. I ordered them weeks ago, thinking I’d have tons of time to break them in, but they were late to be sent out, so I thought they’d never arrive and I’d just have to run in the old knackered ones and live with sore knees. As it happened, a fellow from An Post delivered them at 1300 the day of the race. I tried them on, walked around in them and they were magical. I couldn’t resist.

So I turned up to Grand Canal Square as directed, at half past six, sporting my new Made In Vietnam Interceptors (As an aside, on the Dart and during the walk in, you could tell all the entrants by their shoes). Cue an hour of farting around in less than flattering shorts waiting for the race to begin. I’m feeling pretty confident, lots of people for whom this 8km is the pinnacle of their training, and they’re nervous, thinking about whether they’ll really be able to do it after all. As I’m an arrogant bastard at the best of times, I’m swaggering about like I was just passing to get some milk from the newsagents and thought I’d do the eight on the way. Ever hear the proverbial saying that pride comes before a fall? It’s true, and if I was religious, supersticious or spiritual, I’d say someone was trying to tell me something.

The report of the starting pistol and… nothing. I don’t know how many people are ahead of me, but it’s a lot. A few thousand, since I’m close to the back of the pack. Maybe a minute later I’m moving. The race is a fun run, so timing’s not that imporatant. Apart from the top three male and female finishers, I don’t think they even take your line time. Certainly by the time I got to the end, no-one was. You just glance up and take your own time. It’s not a high-tech affair, so your time is from the starting pistol, unlike, say, the Dublin Marathon, where a chip in your bib notes when you actually cross the start and finish lines. So naturally, from starting at the back, I want to move my way up through the pack pretty quickly. I start weaving up, leaping small obstacles, running pretty fast. A much faster pace than I can maintain for the entire distance, so I’m just showboating. I know I’m going to be overtaken again by some of the guys and girls I’m passing, but I didn’t expect it to happen quite so quickly.

Five or six hundred meters in, at the second corner, trying to sprint around the outside of the turn in oreder to overtake even more people, I went over on my ankle. I’m not sure of the technical term the doc used, but you do know what I mean. It happens when you’re walking or running along, and for no apparent reason, the ball joint in your ankle decides it’s had too easy a day and spices it up by folding inwards, right when you put your weight on it. Like a Grade-A wanker, I went from passing out folks to flailing about like an eejit on meth, sporting a grimace a low-quality porn star would be proud of. I stood there looking at the passing runners and thought, feck it, I’m not stopping now. Probably as bad a descision as the time I decided to work out how many shots there are in a bottle of whiskey by drinking it dry.

I hobbled on, and the pain subsided by the 1km mark. Now, I know now that the pain was gone because of adrenaline or whatever allowing me to ignore it. That, and I suddenly had more pressing concerns. You might have wondered why I wasted a paragraph describing the purchase of a pair of runners earlier, but now is where it’s relevant. The new shoes that felt so comfortable walking the dogs around the block were now proving the age-old adage about breaking in shoes. By the halfway point, I felt like I was running on bubbles. Not the air bubbles of fancy basketball-player-branded Nikes, but rapidly growing blisters of blood. At the 6km mark, or thereabouts, they both burst. It was a sweet, sweet relief of agony.

When the race was over, and I had finished with a woeful time of just under 44 minutes, I was sitting on a stone bench opposite two more serious runners. One of them asked me in lightly accented English about my pained looks. I told him about the blisters and their cause, the new runners now lying on the ground at my feet, insteps crimson with blood. His response: “They’re not new anymore!”

It was really only that night, after getting home from celebratory pints in town, with a friend who kindly brought me band-aids and undiluted dettol for the blisters, that I realised my real problem wasn’t the blisters, but my ankle. I was really worried after a trip to the hospital, where the very young, very beautiful doctor (female, in case you’re wondering) told me it could take six weeks to heal. I’m still waiting for an appointment with a Physiotherapist (who won’t like the Physio-The-Rapist pun I can’t wait to use), but it looks like I’ll be good to go for my first summer engagement this Saturday.