This is the fifth article in a series describing my first ever running injury in 20 years, how I’ve dealt with it heretofore, and my path to recovery.

Let me start out by saying the past two days have been days of good news.  My knee is feeling as good as it has in a while, I received some positive news on the personal finance front and a great friend landed a great job yesterday, all of which make me very happy.

I’m also due for the next installment of my injury tale so without further ado, here is where the story gets interesting.

I returned home from Germany on the most miserable plane ride I have had and firmly believe I probably will ever have.  Having no immunity to any German cold viruses, naturally I caught one.  And I caught it about five minutes before I boarded my flight.  With no opportunity to take any medicine, nor procure any tissues (I would speak the word Kleenexes here but it feels funny writing it), this was not a fun experience.

I survived, however, and a few days upon returning to San Francisco returned to see Nicole for my next PT checkup:

“How are things going?”

“Eh, about the same.”

“Any new issues?”

“Nope.”

Sheepishly, I denied any outlawed running, and I think she believed me (it’s possible she saw right through me, she’s sneaky).  After all, my knee did feel fine the day after I iced it in Germany, and things were still pretty much normal now that I was back in SF.  One more PT visit down, things with my knee seemed to be progressing as they should, life was good.

Training log for May

Two more weeks went by, weeks in which I obeyed the no-running rule (you can view May’s training log overview to the right).  I also wasn’t doing my PT exercises as frequently as I probably should have but I was making noticeable positive progress each day so my incentive to do so was definitely diminished.

At this point I should break the chronological timeline and go back to the middle of March of this year.  My great friend Rob lives just outside of NYC and approached me with the idea of participating in the New York Ragnar Relay, a 182-mile relay race that starts upstate in the Catskills and roughly follows the Hudson River south before finishing in the Bronx’s Van Cortlandt Park, where I ran a few times during my very brief collegiate running career.

Having just come off a rough week, I was eager for the adventure and said I was in.  I bought my plane ticket, and added New York and the race date, May 15-16, to my very busy spring travel calendar.

Scene along the Ragnar Relay course in upstate New York

Fast forward now back to May.  Despite my knee injury I was determined to run the relay – I had been looking forward to it for a long time, and besides, I knew it would be a ton of fun.  I never told Nicole it was on the horizon but it was there, in the back of my mind, an indelible date on my training and recovery calendar that Nicole, naturally, had no idea existed.

And my PT visits in the beginning of May proved promising.  In fact, the timing seemed to be working out perfectly: the Monday before the Ragnar Relays Nicole said I could start running.  The beginning of that week I was in LA for a conference for work, and I ventured out of my hotel the first evening for a 1-mile run.  A half mile out, a half mile back, and a grin from ear to ear: everything felt fine.

The next day, I added an extra half mile to the total, taking in a little bit more of the Simi Valley scenery.   And the next day, a whopping 2 miles.  No knee issues, and I was floating on air.  I caught the evening flight out of Burbank Airport back to San Francisco, switched terminals at SFO and hung out there for about an hour, then caught the red eye for Newark, the omnipresent plane noise accompanied by thoughts of the pending running adventure.

There are many Ragnar Relay events held across the country in places diverse as New England, Florida, Washington state, southern California, Arizona, Utah, Wisconsin and Minnesota.  The premise of each is the same: 12 team members run approximately 180 miles starting sometime on the morning of the first day, and finish approximately 24 hours later.  The teams split up into two vans of six people each, and while one van’s six runners are racing, the other six can drive ahead, and rest for their upcoming legs (this becomes especially important during the overnight legs).   The race is divided into 36 legs, three for each runner.  No two legs are the same.  Some are mountainous or hilly, some flat.  Some are more than eight miles, some less than three.  Some run during the day, and some occur at 3 in the morning.  The only consistency in the whole plan is that all 11 runners on your team need to run before you can run your next leg; hence if you start with leg 2, that means you also run leg 14 and leg 26.

The New York Ragnar Relay course: 182 miles from Kingston to NYC. My legs were nos. 8, 20, and 32.

My team consisted primarily of Rob’s co-workers and their acquaintances, most of whom were recreational runners.  I wouldn’t consider myself a professional runner per se, but I was a former high school and collegiate athlete, a former coach and a member of an ultrarunning club so by comparison I was among the team’s die-hards and earned the privilege of running the longest and most difficult legs of the 182-mile jaunt from Kingston to New York.

In April, before my injury, I was thrilled about my assignment.  After the injury, you can imagine I was a bit nervous.

But I wouldn’t know what was in store for me until that fateful day in May arrived.

This is the fourth article in a series describing my first ever running injury in 20 years, how I’ve dealt with it heretofore, and my path to recovery.

In my last injury post I detailed what happened to my knee, why it happened, and my physical therapist’s prescription for recovery.  Now I’ll share the beginning of my meandering (and still not fully traveled) road to recovery.

As I mentioned in my previous post, following through on the prescription of therapeutic exercises wasn’t as easy as listening to it, and then telling my PT Nicole that I would do what she was telling me I should do.  Prior to my injury I would run 30 miles in a heartbeat but you would have had to beat me just to get me to do 30 pushups.  If physical activity didn’t involve running, or any of a number of team sports like baseball or basketball, I wasn’t interested.

So the directive to perform a number of exercises each night involving odd body movements targeting muscles in areas I never knew I had them was not necessarily met with loads of enthusiasm on my part.  My first few visits to see Nicole I would dutifully report that I had performed all of my exercises in the intervening days when that was really only a half-truth, if not a quarter-truth.  The truth was that I hated doing anything that didn’t involve running.  And I’m sure Nicole knew.  But like she always tells me, “this is why I learned just as much about psychology in PT school as I did about physiology!”

The streets of Grossostheim

Nevertheless, my initial diagnosis was a moderate tear of my MCL, something from which it should only have taken me about four weeks to recover (with “should” being the operative word here).  The fact was, however, that I had a work trip to Europe planned to London, Paris, Frankfurt, Cologne, and Munich at the end of April and on the weekend I was going to be in Frankfurt I was planning to run the Marktplatzlauf (rough translation: Marketplace Run) 10K in Groβostheim, a little town not far from my company’s offices outside Frankfurt.  And no little MCL tear was going to keep me from running my first road race in Europe.

My friend Brandon had just moved to Frankfurt to spend in a year in our office there and along with one of our German coworkers we jumped on the Autobahn and headed out to Groβostheim for the race.  The town was quaint, everything you might expect from a western European countryside town, with its church steeple anchoring the central town square, and cobblestone streets that seemed to meander in every direction with no particular rhyme or reason.  It was a unique feeling: the juxtaposition of this historic town, a scene with which I was not at all familiar, and that of a typical road race, something that’s as familiar to me as apple pie.

I studied German for a year in high school and two years in college and like to think I can speak it with some level of conversational competency.  (For some reason, my German always seems to improve with a drink or two).  And after spending four days in France, an incredibly beautiful country but one whose language I am terrible at even attempting to speak, I was excited to have the chance to flex my German pipes (yeah, E-Trade commercial) in the land of native Deutsch speakers.

It was a little bit more difficult than I imagined, as native speakers naturally speak very quickly.  And with my limited vocabulary, I found myself ensuring I only spoke to people in German when I knew their answer would consist of words I would understand, such as “Where is X?” or “What time is it?” or “How much is that?” (I know, I must have been a thrilling conversationalist).  I didn’t know too many German words related to running other than laufen (to run), schneller (faster), langsamer (slower), or die Schuhe (shoes), so I pretty much kept to myself on the starting line.

The gun went off and my knee felt great.  As we turned one sharp corner after another I kept avoiding the cobblestones as much as possible to prevent any cobblestone-induced injuries.  Aerobically, it had only been about three weeks since I had last been regularly running so I was able to stay near the front of the pack for awhile.  I followed the leaders through the town scenes of what I imagined could have been a World War II-themed video game (except without all the blood and destruction).

My race bib

The course consisted of four 2.5K laps around the same loop, with each lap crossing through the Marktplatz twice.  After lap one I was beginning to notice a slight tingling in my knee.  After two laps I knew I had issues.  I was planning to peel off the course and finish with the 5K runners, who of course only needed to do two laps, not four.  No sooner was I veering toward the finish chute, however, when a nice little German lady noticed that my racing bib was color-coded for the 10K race and shooed me back down the street.  And, in my state of concern for my knee, I couldn’t at that moment quite come up with the words “My knee hurts, I have to stop.”

So I did one more half lap, where I conveniently blended off the side of the course into the middle of the crowd in the Marktplatz.  My knee was not happy with me.

Damn.

I was a little bit worried.  I arrived back at Brandon’s place in Frankfurt that evening and promptly iced my knee (icing: another activity I was never very fond of until this injury).  We then went out that evening to the Nacht der Museen (Night of the Museums), where all of the many museums (film and TV, natural history, aerospace, and so on) along the Main River in Frankfurt are open during the nighttime and have bands and open bars.  I definitely recommend it if you’re in Frankfurt at the end of April.

I woke up the next morning, and my knee, surprisingly, felt okay.  But I made no plans to run on it, and would not do so again for, oh, another two weeks or so…

The Marktplatz: Race start and finish