Today I went for my first run since tearing my Achilles tendon in March.  Come to think of it, this was my first run since November.  That’s the longest layoff between runs since I was eleven years old.  It was the most pathetic run ever – twenty minutes on a track at a 10 minute mile pace – but it was a big step in my rehabilitation.

My biggest revelation during my layoff has been how much I love running.  I haven’t thought of myself as a runner for twenty years…

[Glory days alert]

When I was a six-foot, 150 pound high school sophomore in New Hampshire, I finished sixth in the state in cros-country running.  In the state championship race, everyone ahead of me was a senior.  My running future looked bright.   I began wondering if I should focus on running as my primary sport.  But over the next few years, I added twenty-five pounds to my skinny frame, and my running only got slower from then on.

[/Glory days alert]

I quickly came to view running simply as a training method for skiing.  Sure, I enjoyed running, but I never looked forward to it the way I looked forward to skiing, or a hike, or a long bike ride.  I did it almost with thinking about it.   Like breathing.  Or eating.  Running was always there,  it was an easy fallback.  Just put on my shoes and head out the door.  I took it for granted.  I could always go running.

Until I couldn’t.

I’ve said before that I’ve dealt fairly well with the mental aspects of being injured.   I ‘ve been able to stay upbeat even when I see or hear of people skiing, biking, or hiking.  But my heart sank every time I saw someone running.  It was an unexpectedly vicious blow to my psyche that surprised me every time it happened.  I think I had subconciously decided that, until I could run again,  I was still injured.   The biking and walking were just rehab.  In my mind, I wouldn’t be healthly until I could  leap forward with both feet off the ground.

On Monday, at my physical therapist’s recommendation, I went to the track to do a jogging pre-test.  I walked ten minutes to warm up.  Then I jogged for 30 seconds, followed by a minute of walking.  I repeated that for ten minutes.  My leg was feeling great.  I had to really pay attention to my pace.  If I let my mind wander, my tempo would start to increase  too much.  For the following ten minutes, I picked it up it to one minute of running, one minute of walking.  Still everything felt good. I finished with one full lap of jogging, which I did in a barn-burning time of three minutes.  I would have jumped for joy if I could have.

So after a few days of rest, I was ready to up the ante to a full jog.  Tonight I went back to the track and ran for twenty minutes straight.  My leg felt fine, which was a huge relief.  It was mentally exhilarating and physically exhausting.  Having passed those tests, the next task is to improve my fitness.

The irony of this whole situation is that my main purpose for doing the Iditarod Inviational was to get back into shape.  Yet here I am three months later, in the worst shape of my life.   There is a long road ahead and the next month is going to be crucial.  The doctor says that in 4-6 weeks I should be back to doing “anything your wife would have let you do before the injury.”  But not only does my leg need to be healed to do that stuff, but I also have to be in shape.  So this month’s task is to regain fitness without overdoing the Achilles rehab.  It is a delicate balancing act.  I’ve already found out the hard way that rehabbing an Achilles tendon requires patience and restraint.  Overdoing it, even just a little bit, can set me back weeks.

The training year starts now.  It’s about time.

But I am making progress, and every few days I get a new taste of the old normal. I’m finally doing some easy bike rides again, after holding off for a few weeks because of a minor set-back. On Wednesday, I did orienteering for the first time this year. I walked the Red course. Even though I was slow, it felt great to be back out there. And I didn’t even finish last!

These small bits of my normal life are like rays of sunshine through the clouds. The trick is going to be avoiding another set-back as I increase my activity level. That is a tougher balancing act than I anticipated.

And yet, I still over-did it. On a bike ride a week ago, I aggravated my calf muscle while climbing a hill, and it swelled up big-time. After a week of self-therapy, it wasn’t getting better, so today I went back to the doctor. I was scared to death that I had re-torn the tendon, and that I would have to start over. Six weeks of healing down the drain.

The good news is that I didn’t re-injure the tendon. The bad news is that I did “anger”, as the Doc called it, the calf muscle because it wasn’t used to the amount of stress I put on it. ( Really? My calf muscle couldn’t handle that one small hill? Man, I’ve lost a lot of strength in six weeks.) The tendon can’t continue to heal with lots of swelling around it. So I got a steroid shot to make the swelling go down and I have to take it very easy for a couple of weeks.

Its a frustrating set-back considering I thought I was doing everything right. But fortunately, it is only a minor set-back and it will serve as a strong reminder to be very cautious in the future.

The last time I wrote, I was very frustrated with my progress, or lack thereof. The first thing the doctor told me when he diagnosed the injury was that no healing could take place until the swelling went away. Additionally, every single person I talked with who has experienced an Achilles injury (and there are lots of them) said the same thing: “Don’t rush it. I tried to come back too soon, and I paid for it for years afterwards.” This scared me enough that I decided I was going to be a model patient. No pushing the envelope. I did everything I was supposed to do: ice, heat, medication, no stress on the leg. Yet my swelling persisted. This was very disappointing.  I wasn’t healing.

When I started physical therapy a few weeks ago, I had a breakthrough. The swelling went down dramatically after doing therapy exercises and stressing it a little bit. It turned out that the swelling wasn’t from a persistent injury, it was from being so sedentary. My legs are used to moving, not sitting immobilized in a cast. Without any activity, fluid was just collecting in my ankle. The therapy was just what I needed. The light activity was getting my blood pumping and flushing out the ankle. And more importantly, I had no pain, even as we gradually increased the strain on the tendon. Finally, progress.

I’ve never been a believer in structured physical therapy for active people like myself. For previous injuries (mostly broken bones) I simply eased back into my normal activities gradually. I thought physical therapy was for old people, fragile people. But this experience has taught me the value of having a professional therapist who knows how much stress to apply and when to apply it. It has made a huge difference for me in just a few short weeks.

I’d also like to thank my friends for not posting any pictures of epic crust skiing adventures on the web  while I’ve been sidelined.  Or at least not sending me the link to any such pictures.  Being ignorant of what I am missing has also made me feel a lot better.

Right now, I am almost back to my normal range of motion in the ankle. I am riding a bike regularly without the boot. I still wear the boot most of the time around the house and at work, and will for another 2-4 weeks. This is mainly to prevent any odd twists or tweaks that could set me back. The doc says that I should be back to normal in six weeks, which will be early June. That sounds great to me, but the doc also issued a stern warning that he meant “normal for normal people, not normal for someone stupid enough to ski 350 miles.”

Point taken.

Monday of this week was the first day of excellent crust ski weather we’ve had so far this spring. Blinding sunshine, frozen snowpack. But I was a good patient and stayed home (well, at work actually).

Tuesday was also an epic crust day and I probably would have given in, except that my son was sick. I figured that if my wife had to stay home with vomiting toddler, I should probably go to work and contribute to the collective family good, rather than go play in the sun. I’m very sympathetic like that.

But when Wednesday morning dawned with clear skies and cold temperatures, well, I think we can all agree that no mortal man can be expected to resist that temptation three days in a row.

One reason I hadn’t been skiing (or doing anything mildly active) prior to today was that my ankle has continued to be swollen. Not good for healing. No matter how I try to baby it, the swelling doesn’t go down. But then yesterday, I had my first real physical therapy session. The therapist really stressed the ankle a lot more than I ever had in the past six weeks. At first, the tendon felt extremely tight and weak, but the more I worked it, the better it felt. And then, when I woke up this morning and saw that the ankle was less swollen than ever since the injury, a lightbulb went off in my head. Maybe a little bit of activity is exactly what I need to reduce the swelling, to get the blood flowing and flush out the ankle. That was all the excuse I needed to grab my skis.

So this morning I drove down to Portage Lake. I picked Portage because its a short, flat, easy ski with spectacular scenery. I could get my crust ski fix without pushing my Achilles too much. But when I got there, there were signs saying “DANGER! Blasting in area – Stay off ice.” The lake looked fine and it didn’t look like they were blasting today, so I thought about going anyway. But I was by myself with no one else around, and on a gimp leg, so I decided to play it safe. I drove down the road to the Placer River valley and headed towards Skookum Glacier instead.

The crust was near-perfect: rock hard with no volcanic ash. My technique was a little sloppy, and I fatigued quickly (did I really lose that much fitness in six weeks? Ouch.), but the ski was spectacular.

I knew I needed to be extra careful of my tendon while skiing. So it was fortunate that I had a pair of Salomon’s latest top-secret prototype boots to protect me. Currently I think there are only three pairs in existence. Mathias Fredriksson has a pair, Andy Gerlach had a pair, I have a pair. Check out my photos.

The whole trip made me so happy. Early morning drive down Turnagain Arm, cruising on top of the firm snow while the crystals sparkled in the sun, feeling my blood pumping again, soaking up the sunshine, and even stopping for a snack at the Tesoro on the way home. It was great to be back in the spring routine again, if only for a day.

Even though March and April are my favorite months to ski in Alaska, I haven’t been too depressed.   Maybe the fact that volcanic ash has slightly tarnished the snow conditions has helped me from being disappointed.  But I’ve been focusing on doing what I need to do to get better (ice, heat, stretching, etc), so I haven’t been able to dwell on missing out. But as my recovery has dragged out longer than I hoped, its been getting harder to stay upbeat.

I was talking with my friend Erik the other day about how we endurance athletes program our minds to endure suffering, and how that translates to other aspects of our life. We inflict pain on ourselves on a daily basis. Sometime good pain, sometimes bad pain. We’ve training our bodies to handle the pain by focusing on the goal. Keep moving, the pain will end as soon as I make it to the finish line. But in life, we don’t always know if there will be a finish, never mind where it will be. This throws a monkeywrench into our coping strategies.

If the doctor had told me, “Your leg is going to hurt like hell for a month, but then it will be 100% healed,” I would have been thrilled. Instead my leg feels fine, but I have no idea when I’ll be able to use it again. This is so much harder to deal with. I’m stuck searching for a finish line that keeps moving. First, my goal was to be recovered in time for crust skiing season (April). Then, when I realized the extend of the injury, the goal was to be ready for Orienteering season (starts in May). Now I have reset my target again – this time to be ready for packrafting and peakbagging this summer (June/July). It could very well be delayed again.

The thing that has hit me the hardest is seeing other people move on.  All my friends are making their summer adventure plans.  All my fellow Iditarod Trail invitational racers are training for their next adventures.  Meanwhile, I’m still stuck in the wake of the ITI.   The analogy that keeps popping into my head is that its like our Rainy Pass trail-breaking adventure, if only everyone else made it through and I was left behind, still stuck in the waist-deep snow, moving one agonizing step at  a time.  

I’m stuck in “wait and see” mode, and the waiting is the hardest part.