You’d think they’d be happy. “Have 2 weeks off”, I said. “No, make it 3. We’ll do nothing except for a bit of walking, and not even much of that”.
Did they thank me? Did they make the most of their time off? No.
After breaking my clavicle I didn’t run for 3 weeks. For the first 2 weeks I didn’t do much at all, and for the first week I was as immobilised as my shoulder. “You’ve got to let the bone begin to knit together”, my body told me, through the medium of PAIN.
Running isn’t much fun with a broken shoulder. You try not to tighten & bunch everything up around your neck, but you have to use the muscles to support the bone. Your arm can move forwards and backwards, but never down. Dropping your elbow sharply feels horrible. You become entirely focussed upon technique; either floating as gently as possible down the road, or single mindedly moving the arm of the broken shoulder back & forth.
I’m not doing much. I’m just jogging, shuffling, testing it out. Finding out what the pain says. I can walk if I want. I don’t need to run. I’m not training. But straight away my damned tendons (of the muscles of my calves, various big and small) are pissed off. They don’t like running any more. I’m trying to convince them, to talk them round to my point of view, with rest, and stretching, and ice. They remain unconvinced. Tough. They’ve got a lot of running to do this winter so they’d better toughen up. I’ll give them a few weeks to get the idea but after that they’ll need to get back to work full time. I daren’t let them know how much I rely on them as they’ll use that as a bargaining tool.
Maybe they’ll appreciate some muddy, soft, off road running.