Over and out

September 25, 2010

My running season came to an abrupt end last Thursday.

The day started well: After I drove from my old home town Zwickau to my new home Halle I went to my new work-place at the university and immediately after that I could sign the work contract.

However, it would have been too nice if that day would have been completed by a good training. In the evening there was a meeting of a local running group (“Lauftreff” in German) in one of the great running areas in Halle. Conditions were very nice, but the uneven ground in the forest broke my neck. After around 25 minutes two mountainbikers tried to pass us on a small single trail. As the second biker passed me, he almost went down and I was distracted for fractions of a second. This was enough to twist my ankle badly. The time my foot hit the ground it seemed like my foot made a 180-degree turn and I could instantly feel that this was not one of the minor sprains but something more serious. I hardly made it back to the car and a running mate had to drive me to hospital.

After an X-Ray and a medical inspection I found myself in a cast and on crutches … argh. The left ankle took a lot of damage: capsule and ligaments are injured and it might even be that the syndesmosis is not as it should be.

Anyway. The marathon plans for this year are canceled, even if the doctors gave me some hope in saying that the cast might come off next week and can be replaced by an orthosis. After six weeks it should be possible to return to “normal” training. In exactly six weeks I was supposed to run my marathon in Frankfurt.

That’s the life of a marathon runner: Training the whole year for this one day you run the marathon (or maybe two, three days).