Spare calf anyone?

My calf muscle problem... is a problem again. Didn't want to say anything (hoping that by not talking about it, it would go away) but on my 1 hour run last Sunday, I tweaked it.

I was jogging along a street on a mild downhill incline and I spotted something out of the corner of my left eye. It was nothing... just something that caused me to twist my body to my left while bringing my left leg down onto the ground and thereby twisting it too. And that was enough to feel a fairly sharp pain in my calf muscle. I was able to jog on, but only by taking shorter stride lengths.

I went for my last, gentle, pre-marathon run this morning (5 days after the above), and I could feel the calf muscle niggling away in the background, taunting me to run a bit harder so that it could give me a full-on TWANG.

On one level I'm incredibly annoyed and frustrated, for obvious reasons... like, I don't know, running a marathon in less than 36 hours. Yeh, that could be it.

On another, I don't care. I'm "bored" of getting injured. There's no time to do anything about it, so it's time to just suck it up, and get on with it. It's a feeling of resignation, of acceptance.

Other than RICE between now and the start of the marathon (which might help a tad), I plan to strap my calf very heavily on race day. Bring it on. Worst case - I walk the remainder of the course. So long as I don't take longer than 6 hours I won't get disqualified for being too slow.

More lovely sponsors please!

4 days to go, sitting at 41% towards my self-imposed fundraising target of AUD$3k.

http://www.justgiving.com/Ross-Gerring

Perhaps my offer to wax my hairy chest and post the video to Youtube if I hit 100% by race day is proving to be a DIS-incentive for people to sponsor me?! I hope not!

Can you spare a few quid, dollars, etc? The cash may be going to Great Ormond St Hospital in the UK, but of course a treatment breakthrough at GOSH is, ultimately, a treatment breakthrough for kids the world over.

All currencies are welcome.

Thanks so much.

Tapering and Taped

Apologies to small children and those of a nervous disposition for the following bum shot. But in the spirit of "a picture is worth a thousand words" I thought I'd stick this one in. What you're seeing is a result of my local physio deciding that my hip pain is due to my "side bum" muscles being weak relative to my "back bum" muscles, allowing excessive lateral movement in my hip joint. So he taped me up very tightly, like a belt, in an attempt to reduce that lateral movement.

It seems to have helped a bit. I've done two short runs since getting taped - a 40 minute and a 30 minute - and the pain is manageable. And by manageable I mean that ibuprofen is, and will be, my best friend.

I'm in the "tapering" phase of my training program... the winding down, the calm before the storm. The theory is that all the hard work is done, and now it's about ensuring that I'm in the best, most rested shape I can be in for race day - which is a week today as I type.

Despite the hip issues, I'm feeling excited and strangely confident about the marathon. That said, I think there's a huge amount of naivety in my confidence :-)

Hip pain

On my 2hr30m run last Sunday I picked up a niggling pain in the lower right side of my back, but perhaps in the hip joint region. I was hoping it was just fatigue-related and that it would quickly better with a couple of days rest like a few of my other aches and pains have. Bad news... it feels like it's getting worse. Not good. I had a 30m jog scheduled on my training program today, but my gut feeling is that running on it will do more harm than good. So I've cancelled the run and booked physio for tomorrow morning. Fingers crossed it's a minor injury with only about 12 sleeps until race day! I will not be denied!

Why haven't I lost more weight?

So a few months back I weighed in at 100kg, and I was expecting to lose at least 5kg, perhaps as much as 10kg. But I've got down to around 96-97kg, and haven't budged from there. A bit baffled.

• I've burnt loads more calories through exercise in the last few months than I've done for a very long time.
• Unless I'm in complete denial, I don't feel that I've increased my calorie intake over the last few months. Indeed I reckon if anything I've reduced it. 
• I've (almost completely) cut out chocolate for the last month'ish.
• I was a moderate drinker of alcohol in the first place, and I'm purposely drinking even less now.
• All my coffees are "skinny".
• I normally eat a healthy, high fibre breakfast with fruit, typically more fruit for lunch, and a good home cooked meal in the evening (thanks wifey!).

Bearing in mind I'm no expert in this area, the only rational explanations I can think of are:

• The old "muscle weighs more than fat" reason, i.e. the effect of my running has been to increase muscle relatively more than it's burnt fat.
• At my age (45) muscle mass/density is a lot less than when I was in my 20s, and you need muscle to burn fat, therefore with less muscle to do the job, burning fat requires a lot more effort than it used to.

Statistics

Here are my running stats (NOT including cycling and swimming), i.e. total distance covered, according to Runtastic:

April - 8.74km
May - 8.71km
June - 31.73km
July - 73.28km
August  - 156.59km

June and July should have both been 100km+ had I stuck to the program, but injuries dictated otherwise. So a poor/slow start, but in the zone now.