I ran! TWICE!

Yep, it's true! After getting a bad medial sprain on April 10th, I'm finally back to running. I think. Maybe.

When I ran up the beach and through the park at the Trinona Triathlon relay that I did 2 weeks ago, I was ready for an achy ankle. The 2 weeks prior to that had shown some progress, but depressingly little progress. It was not uncommon for me to step a little funny and just slightly *tweak* it. It got a little better and I was tweaking it a little less leading up to Trinona.

Then a weird thing happened after the Trinona Triathlon relay: running up the beach to hand off the chip in T1 seemed to HELP! It felt the best it had felt since before injuring it the 2 days right after the race! And I suddenly wasn't worried about tweaking it - it didn't feel like it'd have any sharp pain anymore. I still did a follow up with the sports med doc a few days later, because he told me on May 1st that "you should be happier about life in about a month" and that I should easily be doing some easy running at that point.

Back at the Docs on June 12.

We both thought I was now ready to try running based on what happened at Trinona. I told him I'd take another week to rest, and then try running. I told him I think the inside of my ankle will be OK (where the sprain was the worst), but there seems to be pain on the top of my ankle deep in the joint. It hurts when my ankle makes an acute angle: like on toe-off while running, or my back foot as I'm going down steps. He said to still try it, and it take it easy - some walk/run workouts.

So I ran on Thursday and on Sunday. Each time, I did a few minutes of walking, about 3 minutes of running, 1 minute or 2 of walking as a break, and then another 3-4 minutes of running. I ran 0.9 miles on Thursday and made it a perfect 1 mile on Thursday. And they went about how I thought - no better and no worse. I could run "normally" if it kept thinking about it. My sprain was totally fine on my first run and just a little sore at the end of my 2nd. But it was the pain on top of my ankle deep in the joint that hurt.

I'll try it again tomorrow. I'll see if it gets better. If not, the next step (according to my doc) is an MRI to check on the condition of the inside of my ankle. For now, I'm still icing 2x a day and doing a lot of hip/leg/butt/ankle strengthening exercises. I'm still doing some simple range-of-motion moves because my right ankle still has less ROM than my left.

Back tomorrow with some fun news about some races this weekend! (If you're on twitter, you've maybe seen a little of what's going on.)