Lesson of the day: if your ankle hurts, do pullups

So this weekend was a birthday trip for my wife to Yosemite, and while it was a great trip, it wasn’t quite so good for my health. I managed to fall off a log (I’m an idiot) and eat something with bell pepper in it (allergy, whoops).

So I came to my workout today with trepidation. My right ankle had been sore the evening before, but felt pretty good. And my stomach had settled from the allergy mess yesterday, and I’d eaten my oatmeal with sunbutter (which always settled well in my tummy). But still, that was a lot of bad happening the day before what promised to be a hell of a workout. On top of that, it was freezing cold and rainy, and all my joints were creaky and ached.

I immediately hopped on the treadmill with the thought that I needed to warm up. running at a nice easy 10 minute pace felt great, and although the ankle/foot complained just the tiniest bit, if I ran mindfully and kept form tight I didn’t feel it at all. I rocked out a mile and was warm, stomach a tiny bit fluttery mostly from the cold, but body ready.

“How do you feel about inclines?” SFF asks me a soon as I hop off the mill.

Erm… that was a tough question. Generally I LIKE running vs the other tortures she puts me through, but inclines do tend to suck a bit, just because I feel like I’m falling off the damn mill. But on the scale of things…

“Fine” I say, “Beats a kick to the head”.

So the mills gets ramped and cranked and we start in on 45 sec on/ 15 sec off sets. One goes by, no prob. Solid legs. 20 seconds into the second one my left ankle gives out. It was like someone had stabbed me right behind my shinbone. I slam my right foot into the mill to give myself a bit of height, just enough to grab the rails, making a god awful noise as I do it.

The look of SFF’s face was priceless. She was halfway between “Shit… are you ok?” and “Stop Fing around and get back on there”, but realized that when it comes to running I never try to ease up or get out of it. That meant I was actually hurt.

Tried to walk. Nope. Ice pick. Sat and rolled the ankle around and discovered the pain came when I flexed it. 10 minutes of massaging, rolling and messing with it, and as suddenly as it came the pain was gone. An ache remained but I finished 6 more 45 second sets on the mill (incline flat) and started my non-cardio stuff, but it was so odd. Best guess right now is that I had pinched a nerve, or this was a delayed injury from falling off that log. Hopefully that was all that was. Weird.

Now the old me might have packed it in for the day after that. Getting injured sucks and is very disheartening. Honestly I might have just quit after the ankle started hurting, figuring to make it up another day, and never making it up. SFF wouldn’t hear of it, and these days I wouldn’t let myself do that. I’d have to be missing a limb or have a bone sticking out someplace to skip the workout. Because excuses are easy to make.

So for the non-running part of the workout, we went “10 for 10”. At first I thought “oh nice, that’s not too tough. Only a hundred reps? (you can now see, dear reader, the skewed perspective one gets when working out with SFF for more than half a year. ONLY a hundred indeed…)

No, of course that wasn’t it. It was 10 exercises, 10 reps, 10 TIMES. I’ll let those of you bad at math count that out on your fingers and toes. As for me… wow, yeah this was going to hurt.

We started with pull-ups/weighted walking lunges. 10 pull-ups, then 10 walking lunges with a 20lb plate held straight up over your head. So 100 pull-ups, then 100 walking lunges. Set one done! (ouchies though, seriously)

The next combo was walking push-ups, v-ups. I was pretty devestated at this point (and actually thought the pull-ups/lunges WERE the entire workout. HA!) but I managed. The push-ups were the tougher of the two, because the flexed foot was making the ankle pain come flaring back every time I hopped over to the side. But I managed to work through these, in no part thanks to Fisher (one of the guys who runs the gym, and an absolute beast of a man who could probably bench press my car) punching out push-ups next to me as easily as most people order a burger down at the drive-through. I mean, what was I gonna do? NOT do push-ups?

So that was another 100 push-ups and 100 v-ups, and 4 exercises out of the 10. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view) I was parked in a 2 hour spot and had arrived 30 minutes early for warmups, so I was getting close to getting a ticket. I was given the rest of the workout as homework to do on Thursday, and I’m thinking I will start to double up my weeks from here on in, with workouts on both Tuesday and Thursday. I’ll make sure to post about that one, it is going to be an interesting one. Right now I’m trying to find a good deal on kettlebells. I’m extremely tempted to make a few of them, as $50 for a 30lb weight seems ridiculous. Stay tuned…

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