01/06/20 – Hole Lotta Trouble

Last Saturday, we decided to try a different Saturday parkrun destination. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Sue has been struggling a little recently, so we opted to drive to a nice, flat run on the easiest local route: Beckenham Place Park.

My own weekly routine has wobbled a bit in the last fortnight or so. I always seem to struggle with warm weather and it’s been an effort to keep to my weekly mileage target. I had convinced myself that this wobble was simply ‘tapering’ for the Half Marathon distance I was planning to do on 31 May. In truth, I hadn’t felt that great on a couple of the Saturday’s distance runs and my recent parkrun times had been going south. And that damned, glute pain just isn’t getting better, although neither is it getting worse.

It does seem to me that Saturday mornings is the hottest part of the week at the moment and the latest one was no exception, nevertheless I was feeling good and fancied breaking 35 minutes as I wasn’t going to be running a mile and a half to the ‘start’ which is what I usually do at South Norwood.

Beckenham Place Park was particularly busy, when we arrived. In addition to a plethora of dogwalkers, several people we recognised as local parkrunners were limbering up and a few more who we didn’t but were proudly displaying their parkrun T-shirts.

We were there about 8.45 and set off immediately as we thought most of these people would be aiming for a 9am start, in fact, there we even more people already running. Good job it’s a nice wide open space.

Towards the end of the first B-shaped lap. I’d set myself the target of trying to catch a parkrunner wearing a purple volunteers shirt some way in front of me. Aside from having to concentrate to properly socially distance and keeping one eye on my target, I felt good and my mind wandered off.

It quickly became apparent that I wasn’t going to catch my mark, but my brain was suddenly jolted by the fact I wasn’t were I was supposed to be. I was way well over halfway around the second B, but my last ‘memory’ was being on the top part of the B of after completing the first lap.

I was genuinely puzzled, my watch was also showing an unexpected time and distance… what on earth?? Had I fallen into a timey-wimey wormhole and been catapulted about half a mile further up the course? If I had run it on automatic – in the elusive zen-like state that running magazines bang on about – I’d done it amazingly fast. I felt like I’d been subject to a brief alien abduction… call for Mulder and Scully!

Although my was mind well and truly occupied by this enigma, I was aware that I was still on a much faster-than-usual pace, as I entered what should have been the final third of a mile. Although my watch was telling me I still had much further to go, I also knew that both Sue and I regularly experience GPS inaccuracies, due to trees and weather conditions – albeit none of this magnitude. I decided to run the full 5k to my watch anyway.

As I came to this decision, I spotted the pathway ahead was completely blocked by a line of three dog-walkers socially distancing in a rather thoughtless manner. I moved to the left, onto rough grass and went down a real hole this time.

My ankle wrenched and rolled over, taking the full weight of my stride. The pain was immediate and intense, I gasped a very rude word and came to a shuddering halt unable to put any weight on my left. The dog-walkers looked on curiously, but offered no sympathy or assistance. One of their greyhounds gave me a consoling lick, so there was that I suppose.

Hobbling towards a bench ankle afire, knowing my hopes to run a Half Marathon distance were dead in the water. All sorts of other ominous marathon-related scenarios began to run through my head. I hadn’t heard a crack, so I didn’t think it was broken and it felt ‘whole’, even if it would bear next-to-no weight. I was still a kilometre from the car so would need get there, I could see Sue on the other side of the park some distance away. I decided to hobble on instead of waiting for her on the bench, thus also disrupting her run.

As I hobbled on the pain eased enough for me to walk, so I obstinately carried on past the car to the point where my watch recorded the 5k mark. Even with the injury and having to walk the rest of the way, I was only nineteen seconds over 35 minutes. A wry grin spread across my face as Sue came into view having finished a decent run in the correct spot.

In spite of the throbbing ankle, I was still intrigued by my missing distance. I could not wait to get home, plug my watch in, and check the route map to figure out what had happened in my ‘missing’ moment.

The answer revealed itself to be predictably mundane… no wormhole, no momentary alien abduction, just user-error. My watch shows that I missed out the whole of the top of the ‘B’. The clue, I came to realise, was my purple-clad parkrun ‘pacer’. I had assumed she would be following the parkrun course and blithely followed in her footsteps. The view at the start of the second loop is very similar to that of the first loop, heading towards a copse of trees, and my mind was tricked into to thinking it was my second time around the first loop. Pah! No Sunday Sport headline for me.

Mystery solved, so it was time to pay attention to my injury. I eased my shoe off to reveal I’d ‘grown’ a second ankle bone (see picture above), so it was a case of RICE for the rest of the day:
R-est
I-ce
C-ompression
E-levation

The discolouration (see below) started later that day and has continued apace with different parts of my foot swelling and darkening since. Additional damage was suffered by my trainers… they were on their last, umm, legs anyway, but the encounter with the rabbit hole tore the heel-sole completely off!

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Despite these tribulations, my daily run is continuing, albeit as a walk and just the bare mile minimum for now. I may have passed the 1,000 consecutive runs marker, but I’m only two months shy of three complete years.

Yes, dear reader, I have no sense, but you’ve probably guessed that by now.