The Return of the Fat Ankle

Oh boy, you guys are in for a treat tonight - pictures of my nasty hairy inflated ankle!!! Now that's quality blogging. I am supposed to be running a moonlight run on the Greenbelt right now, but instead I am sitting here with my feet up talking to you. Why is that? Well, the picture above may give you some clue.

I got up early this morning to go run Walnut Creek with Clea and her dog Pancake. It was a beautiful morning with a slight breeze, the park was deserted and it was perfect for running. We set off with our headlamps on and ran the bmx loop and the windy loop before heading off into the maze of trails in the main portion of the park. Pancake has a flash of white in her tail and as she ran ahead of us it was like following our own mobile glow stick. In short, we were having fun. We were taking a nice easy pace and chatting away when I happened to mention that while I had turned my ankle a good few times I was yet to do a full blown face plant. Oh fool that I am. About 4 miles in a sneaky root reached out, grabbed me and delivered that particular trail runner's rite of passage. Down I went - 9.9 for artistic interpretation, 10 for embarrassment.

Got up, dusted myself down and just had to laugh at the absurdity of it all. And of course I'd sprained my ankle (yet again) somewhere during the swan dive. Just how many of my blog postings have to include various combinations of the words "ankle" and "sprain"? Clea was really nice and we took it easy for a few minutes so I could walk it off. Then I decided to suck it up and we started running again. That's the beauty of these ankle sprains - while running you can pretty much ignore them and after a while you don't even notice them anymore. As long as you don't stop.

By now it was getting light. This side of the park has some really pretty trails and I soon forgot about the ankle. Somewhere close to the powerline we saw our first mountain biker and headed down to the (dry) creek. Once over the creek it was a quick run along the pool loop and we were back to the parking lot to complete a nice 10k run.

It was an enjoyable run and one I would like to do more often, but now I had to hightail it to work so we said goodbye and I headed off home. Caught Nancy and Gavin just as they were leaving and hopped in the shower. Once I'd cleaned all the dirt off my leg I realized I also had a nice big cut down the side of my knee, but much more noticeable was the fact that my ankle had stiffened up and was not very pleased with me. Now while I can be pretty stupid at times, I'm not a complete idiot and decided it was wiser to not run the Greenbelt tonight (and probably just as well as I'm limping quite badly at the moment).

When I got to work I found an email from my mate Jeff who is just getting over his own ankle injury, so I couldn't resist emailing him back about my little accident. We ended up deciding to run Ken's Loop on Monday so I'd better start putting it on ice.

If all this sounds dramatic, let me just add that these things usually look much worse than they really are. I will probably be back up and running within a few days, which is just as well as I'm helping to do course marking for the Saint trail race tomorrow.

I find that beer usually helps too.