"I've always held it a crime to anticipate evils, I will believe it a good comfortable road until I am compelled to believe differently."

Meriwether Lewis, 1805.

This is a quote I saw somewhere around this time last year and it became another fixture on my fridge for the whole year. As I was embarking on a world of ultra distance training and racing I figured that I would roll with everything and not be intimidated by a long(er) run or ride (than I had ever done before). It was especially true due to the fact I was going to be doing a bunch of trail races in the spring to change up the usual routine of normal road running for the Ultraman. I assumed it could only help by doing more miles in the trails as opposed to the cold, hard road. I didn't anticipate that by increasing my miles too soon in the fall working towards H2H would lead to injury and a drastic change in training through the spring.

I got this little blurb of info from a search about how much weight is exerted on the body when running. Although I can't verify everything as correct or not, they did make references to references
so it must be true: Running can be considered an uninterrupted series of small jumps from one foot to the other. During each foot strike the body is exposed to repeated impact forces estimated to be two to three times the body weight of the runner. Applying this fact to a 170-pound runner (me), who has an average of 680 foot-strikes per foot per mile (85 strikes for one foot per minute, at 8 minute miles), during a one-mile run each foot would endure between 116 and 173 tons of force. Typical runners training from 40 to 80 miles per week could expect to expose their bodies to approximately 27,000 to 54,000 impacts per leg per week, equivalent to about 4600 to 13800 tons of force. This is an astounding amount of stress to the lower extremities that increases the likelihood of injury.

So there you have it. Seeing as I was doing around eighty miles a week or more last fall it's easy to conclude that was the reason I started to get those dreaded shin splint pains on my left shin in February. I don't know why they waited four months after Haney to rear their ugly heads, could be that it could have been avoided with a little rest afterwards. You'd think losing a couple toenails
would be reason enough to take time off, but no, I had to push through for the trail runs. Shin splints are deceiving because after a warm-up of running they don't hurt anymore until you're
done and scarfing down Advil to ward off the inevitable pain. After a trip to the doctor in February where he concluded that the symptoms were probably shin splints and not a stress fracture, he
promptly ordered me a bone scan - in May. That was great, I had three 50km trail runs in March and April and a 100km race the day before the bone scan.

We were both on the same page to stay off the hard surfaces like concrete, asphalt, dirt, and gravel, I headed to the gym for a revised schedule of water running and eliptical trainer workouts.
The eliptical was great because it was a great way to simulate what the muscles go through on a hilly trail run. Water running on the other hand is like a slow, near-drowning death that is prevented
only by moving your legs and arms enough just to keep your chin above water. I mean people who hate treadmills for their "boring factor" would rather lose both legs so they couldn't water run. The pool was about 15 metres long and wide and to go around and around, with no music, seeing the same walls for and hour or ninety minutes was tough but mentally it was beneficial. If you can do that, you can do anything. People would stare and laugh behind my back wondering what in the @#$% I was doing and why I was doing it. Then I could see them try it when they thought I wasn't looking and was definitely not what they thought it was. They went back to their floating belts pretty quick.

All the while I was doing this I would make Advil my close companion and do my trail races which surprisingly didn't hurt at all when I was running them. Only if I hit the pavement I could feel it. So the results from the bone scan revealed, much to my doctor's bemusement, a stress fracture that was showing signs of healing. Maybe the workouts strengthened it he figures. He thought to send me to the UBC sports medicine doctor (in July) whose prognosis was basically my legs were bowing out abnormally, I had weak hip adductors, and my core strength was a mess. Just what I needed to hear forty-five days from the biggest race I've ever done. But hey, at least the swimming and biking were coming along! Biking was pretty standard this year, much like an Ironman only more distance and less speed. The only real highlight was doing a ride on the out and back portion from Princeton about a month before the race. Ran over some pretty sharp rocks and had two blowouts, the rear sidewalls nearly shredded. I limped back to town to the bike shop where Jim the owner graciously gave me a new tire and two tubes with the faith that I would phone him the next day with my visa number. Lesson learned: always carry more than $10 on you when doing long training rides. Swimming capped out with a 6000m pool and 7000m lake swim. Staring at the black line at the bottom of the pool for over an hour and a half was mentally taxing to say the least. Watching out of the corner of my eye people come swim for a bit then go, seeing the sun move across the sky through the windows.

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