To cut a long story short (well, shorter...), I completed my BA in Physiological Sciences in June with a PhD lined up for October, decided I couldn't face any more studying for the foreseeable future, arranged to start April 2013 and then, predictably, started to miss university so arranged to start in December. As you can probably guess, decisiveness is not one of my strong points. So, I'm very excited to be starting a PhD in Obesity (trust me, you have to be quite careful when certain people you meet ask you what your PhD's in...) in December at Imperial College London.
Amazingly, I've got this far without mentioning running but that couldn't really last given the blog title...Running is a massive part of my life and has been since I was 11. It's given me the best friends ever, a lot of enjoyment, and also a fair amount of tears (usually me being over dramatic, which is a speciality of mine). I also have a slightly obsessive personality with control freak tendencies so distance running was probably both one of the best (though you could argue worst) sports for me... I currently compete at distances of 5k and above but in time (read once I can get it past coach Nick :) I want to run some really fast marathons.
I have been coached by Nick Anderson for the last two years, which has seen me improve massively. He always seems to know the right thing to say in every situation (and I have a suspicion he is psychic as well but perhaps I'm just transparent...). Up until meeting Nick, I was mostly self coached but given my extremes of motivation and enthusisasm I need someone to erm...provide moderation and stop me from running myself into a big hole. I also probably need someone to give me a big slap in the face when I have my one of my panics (just ask my dad about the time I fell in a puddle during a particularly muddy cross country race and convinced myself I nearly drowned...)
2012 has been a tricky year for me where running is concerned. My cross country season was solid (if short lived) with a 2nd place at the Met League before an army of winter bugs made me a non-starter for the rest of it. However, I managed to remain healthy long enough to run the Reading Half Marathon, where I surpassed my target of sub - 80 with a 79.13 clocking and discovered the joy of the longer races. Since then things have been a bit dodgy to say the least. Due to a combination of university finals, shingles and niggles, I haven't really raced and I'm presently struggling with an "injury" that seems custom - made to do my head in.
Basically, for the last 3 months or so, my left ankle has felt 'dodgy'. There has been pain but this seems to be relatively minor with running (walking is actually worse). For a while I thought it was my Achilles and I did the usual - stretching, strengthening, icing, etc, but it just didn't respond. It took three physios, a pair of makeshift orthotics, countless random exercises involving weird amounts of rubber bands and cable pulleys (and odd looks at the outrageous number of gyms I signed up for trial passes for to be able to use them for free) to finally find out the problem was. My (also awesome) physio Mark Buckingham concluded it was probably an extra bit of bone in my ankle that was irritating the soft tissue (or posterior ankle impingement to give it it's proper name).
Basically, my ankle doesn't seem to want to dorsiflex at all and feels like its stuck on wrong when i run. It's like the man flu of all injuries - i can run almost my usual amount with relatively minor amounts of pain. But trust me - you don't get much in the way of sympathy from friends and family when you say "oh but I can only run 77s for my 400m reps rather than 75s). Cue typical over - analytic Hayley thoughts, obsessive ankle - monitoring and much redundant ankle fiddling. So as it turns out, tomorrow, I'm seeing a foot and ankle specialist for my non-injury so I can find out if I do need surgery.
Whilst this is going on, I'm trying to train as much as possible (without overly irritating anything) whilst I potentially wait for surgery. The plan is to then come back to training having hardly lost any fitness with my dream of running a super - fast half or full marathon next spring still intact (possibly wishful thinking but I may as well aim high). So now having told you all about how injured I am, I'm off to run for 30 minutes before my race on Saturday. During my run, I'll be telling myself how many 'injured' runners would love to be able able to do this and how I'm actually very lucky (and I REALLY do believe this, i promise). However, do try and have some sympathy (even fake sympathy because I probably don't deserve the real kind), I will spend the whole time worrying about how foot feels like it doesn't work and is stuck on the wrong way...
Well atleast i'm dealing with it better than Hitler...
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