The Injured Triathlete

The injured triathlete is a difficult thing to be around.  I can say this without fear of hurting the feelings of anyone I know who trains and competes for these races.  We know that we can be a real pain in the butt during normal circumstances.  This is bound to happen when someone trains intensely at three different sports and goes through the rollercoaster of competition.

If a healthy triathlete is a 6 on the difficult-to-put-up-with scale, then a triathlete with an injury is easily an 8.5 on a good day and a 9.5 on a bad one.  At some point, a portion of our happiness relies on training and competing. 

I've been pretty fortunate in that I haven't suffered too badly from all the training, but recently my running has been sidelined by some kind of a muscle strain in my right calf.  The crap thing is, I don't even understand really how I hurt it.  I was just running on the treadmill at a liesurely 9 min/mi pace and all the sudden sharp pain in my calf.  I tried to walk it off, but nope, it was there to stay.

I gave it a day with no running and it felt fine again so I went for an easy run, BINGO, 3 miles in it starts hurting again.  So I stop and shift my training to other things like swimming and biking and weights.  I give it another couple days then test it out, 2 miles this time before I'm limping badly.

So at this point, me and my bike are becoming good friends down in the basement.  The folks at the pool are seeing me more often than ususal.  I'm still grumpy because I want to continue to improve my running, but I guess I'm going to have to give it some serious downtime.

I guess this is the beauty of triathlons, there is alway something else you can do to keep up the training.