What I did on Summer Vacation (while injured)
I was recently chatting a little with another member about life not being so bad when you have a minor injury that keeps you from doing triathlons. Long story short: I got a stress fracture in my leg that kept me from running for about two months from mid-June to mid-August. I'm trying to learn to be more Zen these days, and I decided to go with the flow during my "summer vacation". After all, this lifestyle lets us do cool things with our fitness, so maybe we should make the best of it when we can't race.
Thought maybe a few good stories like this might raise morale of others going through something similar.
I was allowed to swim all I wanted and bike as long as I didn't go crazy. I took that to mean nothing more than a couple hours on the bike. So, during my "vacation", I paid a lot of attention to my younger kid and took maybe 3000 pictures at her competitions (which fortunately coincided with my injury). After throwing most of them away, I had a lot of grateful parents of other people who liked the good ones. :-)
I also got to swim my first Open Water 5K event. I didn't kill myself over it, but the course had a 1.2 mile loop (obviously designed for triathletes), so I was pretty pleased that my 2.4 mile split with no wet suit and no one to draft from was right on my normal IM time. I finished near the tail end of these real swimmers, but I had a blast. My daughter finished almost half an hour before I did...she won the women's division of the 5K officially, but actually won the 1.2 and 2.4 splits in practice as well, since all three distances started together and used the same course. TJ Tollakson won overall. So TJ beat OJ. Oh well. :-)
Toward the end of "vacation" we went to Rocky Mountain National park and hiked. Low impact of hiking meant I was ok to do anything I wanted. We met my college aged son and - among other things - ascended Longs Peak, which is a pretty tough day hike up to one of the 14,000+ elevation peaks in the park.
Pictures from the RMNP trip are here: https://plus.google.com/photos/+WilliamJenks/albums/6184750951498032241 (since "photos or it didn't happen") There are some shots of Olivia (daughter) Chris (son) and Cynthia (spouse) in there.
And now I'm back in the game. Patrick is putting a ball and chain on me making me take it slow to come back on my running. I'm going to do a half IM distance race just for fun later, but I am totally aware that this will be a "recreational" event instead of a "competitive" one for me. And, in the end, despite having had something bad happen, I think I'm going to have had a pretty fun year.
Please...share your story, too.
Comments
I didn't have an injury, but major life stuff that was stressful and prevented training as I would have liked. Going into IMCHOO in a month with less fitness than I hoped, but I have low stress now and am very happy in our new home! Next big stressor is sending my baby off to college!!!