jockturner.com

Yes, the tight calf, sore heel, twisted ankle etc etc- it’s all a distant memory. The legs are feeling good, my fitness is better than ever and I’m feeling good!

I’m still not running too far with the runs averaging about 10k at the moment but I’ve got the rucksack on and I’m running over pretty rough ground – that’s got to count for something surely? Anyway, I’ve got a pretty good regime at the moment whereby I’m training every other day and rowing on my ‘rest’ days! This helps my overall fitness and gives my legs a breather – well the running muscles get a break while the rowing ones take over – you know what I mean!

I’ve even moved the office out of the spare room/gym today to get the rower set up permanently again – it is a bit of a pain setting it up every time. So now I can just hop on whenever I want – within reason. I’ve had a great idea for next year where if I can afford it I’m going to buy a log cabin/summerhouse and knock down our old shed. That way I can move the rower into the cabin and install some sounds and vision possibly. Then I can go out and row to my hearts content – maybe Zoe will put a futon out there and encourage me to sleep out there too!

Anyway, better get off to bed as I have another busy day ahead tomorrow. Got to nip to the doctors first thing and were having our new vinyl (posh lino) laid in the kitchen and I need to be around to shift the white stuff. Should be smashing when it’s all down. Looking forward to Wednesday when the new NMMC website finally goes live – well that’s the plan anyway. Can finally invoice them for the work – this has been a long term project of 2 years!

Oh also went out for a meal last night with Steve and his partner Karen – Food for Thought in Fowey. Really lovely meal and company. I think we’ve found some new friends! Steve has offered another flying trip in the week – weather permitting – this time off to the Scillies. Might try and take Thursday off providing I don’t have any meetings.

Just before I go, managed to bag a great domain name at the weekend – www.websitesandbeyond.co.uk! I’m thinking of renaming the company again as I think this captures the spirit of what I do and my humour – also conjures up some great images for a logo although I haven’t even thought that far ahead yet! Better get the Twitter and Facebook pages bagged before they go.

TTFN

Just a quick update. If only my left leg could stop getting injured I think my training would be well on track. As it stands though I keep picking up silly pulls, twists, tweaks etc and always on my bloody left leg. Tonight I was trying to run off a really badly pulled calf muscle strain and things seemed to have settled down and I stopped to take a drink, than as I started up again I stood on a stupid stone and twisted my weak ankle again!

Fortunately it was only one of the minor twists – the kind that make you cry out and breath really heavily for about a minute before subsiding to be just a throbbing soreness, which typically stiffens overnight and is painful the next few days.

Oh well, nobody said it would be easy. Maybe next time I post something I’ll talk about how great the training is going and how many miles I’ve managed to put in over the last week…then again, maybe not.

You know what, I’m seriously considering building a small gym in the back garden and going back to just indoor rowing – it’s hard work but at least you don’t get injured every time.

OK, firstly training has not being going as well as I had hoped! Usual complaint of increasing the training load too quickly and suffering an overuse injury – this time a bruised heel.

Actually it’s not really bad and if I was honest I could probably run longer distances but I’ve heard that training on a heel injury can have a long lasting impact and in some cases take ‘years to heal’.

So I’ve decided to take it easy and throw everything at it to get it healed quickly: There’s been heat (heat pad), cold (ice pack), a combination of both (to encourage rapid blood flow), non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), some taping, massage, and then more massage with a borrowed novasonic device from College.

Not that I’ve been letting myself go, I’ve been rowing every day for the last 5 days and in total have rowed over 50K! I’ve also been out doing some easy jogging and today went down to the beach to try some barefoot running.

I had listened to an old podcast from Steve Chopper who had interviewed a guy who always ran barefoot because he, like me, was always getting injured. Now he doesn’t even have any trainers but just uses special rubber shoes called ‘Vibram five fingers‘ and he loves them.

I probably ran about 5k in total on the beach and was really leased with how it went. Apart from having sore soles due to grainy sand, the injured heel held up well with no pain – a good sign. I was deliberately running on the fronts of my feet and kept the stride length down as others had advised and even though the sand is tough to run on I really enjoyed it. I even ran the last 1k along the water’s edge in and out of the surf – bliss! I really am lucky to live so close to the beach.

So over the next week or so my main aim is to carry on building things up on sand in bare feet and see how it goes. Only when I am 100% satisfied that the heel is better will I start on the harder trails again. I’m not too worried as I’m keeping fit and building my strength and stamina up on the rower in the evenings.

I’ll report back in a week and let you know how it’s going. PS there’s a great video about heel pain I’ve just come across here http://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/foothealth/Pages/HeelPain.aspx

Thanks to Steve Chopper at ‘A Mile with Me‘ for putting me on to this one. Thougt I would embed the video as Zach liked it and I wanted to be able to find it again quickly if I needed to:

Just got back from what is turning out to be our annual summer visit to Dartmoor. Each time we go we cover more ground and try to visit Tors that we haven’t seen before although there were a few over the weekend that we had seen before and even staying overnight at Steeperton Tor which we have done in the past. Still that didn’t detract from a great weekend spent roaming around wonderful Dartmoor with my boy! See the route here – http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=3965185. Zach loved it as usual and is getting more and more confident map reading, cooking and setting up camp. I’ll make a Bear Grylls of him yet!

Scary to think the next time I’ll be up here will be with Mike in probably much worse weather conditions either training for or actually running the Mountain Marathon. I hope the visibility is worse than today otherwise there’s going to be a lot of racing snakes who post some very fast times. We should do well if there’s plenty of fog as we know the ground and a few shortcuts along the way – fingers crossed!