Today I did not exercise outside. I haven’t been able to say that since April 30. My streak is over at 120 days. And it’s over because I’m injured. This time, the cause of the injury wasn’t a bike crash. I have sustained some sort of repetitive stress injury to my left calf muscle, the gastrocnemius. The injury surfaced 2 miles into my walk yesterday morning, and it was all I could do to limp 0.6 miles back to my house. Today I did nothing. I’m going to stay off my feet for a couple of days and hope for the best.
I have experience with injuries of this type. The first time I felt this pain was in 2001 during a softball game. Jogging from the dugout to my position at the beginning of a new inning, I felt a pop and experienced a sharp pain. I turned around to see who had hit me with a ball or some other object, but that wasn’t the cause. The calf muscle became tighter over the next few hours and left me with a limp for about a week. This injury reappeared a couple of years later in another softball game. On that occasion I was not jogging but sprinting out of the batter’s box to beat the throw on a ground ball. That sudden acceleration seemed to be the cause.
Yesterday’s event didn’t come with a pop or any other sensation of catastrophic failure, so I’m hoping for a rapid recovery. But this is a setback for sure. I don’t know whether I will be able to participate in this Thursday’s cyclocross practice at Royal Oaks. With the first race of the WCA season now only 13 days away, my first priority is to heal. If I lose a little top-end fitness in the meantime, then that just has to be OK.
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