I've had a few injuries of late. The finger dislocation back in August still isn't fully healed. That's apparently entirely normal. Then in early September I had a niggle in my ankle that turned into some sort of achilles injury. I think this may have been caused by using both my road shoes and trail shoes too long so they weren't giving the required support and allowing by toes to splay out. I eased of a bit, doing shorter runs (but twice a day), some specific exercises and ball massage for both the leg and foot.
Although I've been able to do up to 2x 10km for a couple of weeks now, I've only managed to get back up to 15km for a single run in the last week or so. I tried it about 3 weeks ago and it wasn't very nice. Basically, eventually the 'niggle' turns into discomfort which turns into pain. In the last couple of weeks there's no noticeable niggle over a standard 10km. Today I decided to try a long run, undefined distance over 20km. No achilles pain, but big chunks of it felt hard. The pace to 23km was fairly solid (2 hours), but the last 8km to get to 31km was over sand dunes and dune slack, so the pace went to shit a bit. Longest run to date. Cardio-vascular is fine; legs are reasonably ok; feet generally hurt. Hopefully will get 35km in a single run soon. Dogs likely to sleep for the rest of the afternoon.
