Running, running, running

Firstly I want to apologise for the terrible picture of my x-ray, I didn't realise how hard it was to take a picture of x-rays!!!!

I bet your all wondering where all the Marathon talk has gone??

I haven't been slacking off I promise!

I was training really hard and seeing some great results until about 3 weeks ago.

I went for my normal Thursday run which was about 6km, it felt fantastic, I got home did my push ups and planks and then did my cool down and stretches. I wandered inside and got a glass of water and BANG my left calf felt like it was on fire! All I cold think of was "NO, please NO!!!!"

I stopped running hoping that rest would fix it, two weeks later we spent 3 days walking around at the Clipsal 500, which I can say didn't help! My husband gave me a massage and it hurt so much! So I decided that it wasn't improving as well as I had hoped so I made an appointment at Sports Med to get it looked at.

My lovely doctor at Sports Med, who knew I had a running plan and that this little injury wasn't fitting into my plan, was wonderful. He did an ultrasound of my leg and ruled out a blood clot, next I had an x-ray and that ruled out a stress fracture (which would have ment no running for 6 weeks), and finally decided that I had just strained my calf.

He also told me that my legs muscles were far to tight for someone running as much as I do and that I needed to sort that out or I would end up hurting myself again and again!

So, the diagnosis was a calf strain and the remedy is to not run for one more week but still stretch every day, then I could start running again starting at 2km and increasing by 1 km each run but no long runs until after Easter. I have to stretch for 30% long before and after each run and stretch on days that I'm not running, after easter I can start my Marathon Training!

I am super bummed that I can't do the Half Marathon I had planned in 3 weeks time but my main goal is the Marathon and I am going to use these few extra weeks to really prepare for the Marathon! Although my grandad used to say that you need 2 years to prepare properly so I really hope I can do this!! Fingers crossed people!!!!