It is 24 days since the accident, and unless I rub the point of my hip or take off my clothes and look at the remains of the bruise in the mirror, it’s hard for me to tell I was ever injured. But that feeling only lasts until I try to run.
I hit the road just before dawn this morning and ran 1.5 miles. I saw a bat overhead — flitting about and getting breakfast, apparently. But I guess when you work the night shift, a meal at dawn is probably more like dinner. I like to see bats. They are an asset to a neighborhood because they eat mosquitoes.
I generally work out before dawn on weekdays. There’s only one streetlight in our neighborhood, about a mile from our house, and I’ve seen quite a bit of interesting wildlife out there in the dark. One morning, I heard a chittering followed by a thump, and an owl landed in the illuminated circle of my headlamp on the road surface. Then it took off with something in its talons. I realized it had knocked a squirrel out of a tree then landed to retrieve it. The interesting thing was, except for the noise of the squirrel’s fall out of the tree, the whole scene played out in utter silence. I don’t know how owls achieve silent flight, but I felt privileged to witness it.
On this morning’s run, I began to feel things moving against each other in my hip at about 0.8 miles. And in my knee for some reason at about 0.9 miles. Then I ran another 0.6 and quit before the hip had a chance to get painful.
The Garmin Forerunner said I ran 10 minutes in heart zones 1 and 2. The rest of the run was in zone 3 (i.e., tempo), until the final seconds, in which I reached functional threshold. At times, I felt like my form was good, but that feeling only lasted for a few seconds.
Then I had a brisk walk home (about 0.3 miles), recovering my heart rate by 25 bpm (from 144) in the first two minutes of the walk. I have been known to have enjoy two-minute recoveries in the 40s, and of course I’d like to get back to that.
When I got home, I added the run to my spreadsheet before doing about 5 minutes with the roller, working my hips, thighs, and calves from every angle I could manage. Then I did the breakfast dishes.
The breakfast dishes represent a salutary change resulting from the accident. Before the accident, my weekday workouts ranged from an hour to two hours, and it was all I could do to get a shower and get dressed for work afterward. That meant the breakfast dishes were always left to my support crew, which she doesn’t seem to mind, but makes me feel a little like a freeloader. But with workouts of a half hour or even 45 minutes, I generally have time to do the breakfast dishes before my support crew gets home from her walk with our dog, another predawn routine.
I am pleased to have run any distance without apparent damage. A lousy mile and a half isn’t much of a workout, but I know it’s best to be patient and not to try to hurry this process, especially at my age.
Today’s weight: 154.7
Waking pulse: 55