So there was only 10 Weeks left to gain speed and much more important to even get to the finish line. I heard from some long Marathon runners, sometime after 30km the body kind of breaks down. Others refer to it as: The man with the hammer comes by to say hello. This is actually a very good image, because it really expresses the pain you are in.
April started and with that my first sport injury. During a fast run I pulled a muscle. Now this happened exactly in the middle of a 17km run, so to get back I still needed to make approximately 8km. Funny thing was that I still could run and it was easier than walking. So I got back home and went straight to the doctor. He looked at it and said: "YEAH, strained muscle, you will be back on you feet tomorrow". Which I did not believe, since I limped and had trouble getting up stairs. A big lump was in my thigh. I went to my usual general practitioner and asked for his opinion, due to good experience I had with him. He gave me a number of a masseur, telling me that a physical therapist is not such a good idea since they only give you exercises and are to lazy for anything else. This was a great advice. I had a great masseur, twice a week and every time the lump got smaller and the pain actually was gone after the first two sessions.
I took the advice from Galloway to give your injuries a lot of time to heal and I knew this would take at least 3 weeks. So my training was on ice, but somehow I knew everything will work out fine. So to at least stay fit I intensified my swimming, which was no problem at all. I even joined the TV 1848 Erlangen which has a great swimming team. Of course I started as a floating tree trunk. They had a "water adaption" training once a week. I never heard of that, since I only did my laps. A friend of mine recommended to take part and I was astonished on how great my swimming improved due to this course. It gives you a great feal for water. Also they did some nice exercises for your crawling technique. But what was really hard was the backward crawl, backward butterfly swimming and all kinds of underwater swimming over a length of about 15m, this really gives you stamina.
So I start swimming 3 time with the club and at weekends alone in the public swimming pool. It was not enough for me and I started to notice that bicycle riding, which I did to get to work, also was no problem for my injury. So I gave it a try with my mountain bike and it was fun. I went to the shops and bought myself a racing bike, got out onto the country roads of Erlangen.
My Triathlon enthusiasm started.
Now and then I tried, very easy, if I could run but after 3 weeks there was no hope, even though my limping stopped. During running the whole pain came back and I knew if I would not stop I could start from the scratch. After 4 weeks I gave it another try, slowly and with a bandage and it worked.
I WAS BACK.
I build up my muscles with slow runs over 2 weeks and got back to my original shape quite rapidly and even better. I continued the training. Now since the Fürther Marathon can get quite hot, I exercised a lot during the midday sun which was complete murder. I even did some long distance (38km) runs during this time, which was actually the cause of getting up so late on Sunday and no training intention. These runs were a horror, I got to meet the man with the hammer and he really killed me. I did had some water supplies with me but it was not enough. At 30km I just felt pain and wanted to get home, which was still 8km away. Nothing helped, I just had to get through it. Getting home after such a run ended always the same, showering, eating 300g of pasta, drinking a lot of water and staying on the couch watching some DVDs.
The last week, as recommended, I just took it easy.
Well than came the Marathon... (to be continued)
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