WEEKEND WARRIOR
Two issues ago, Brunty wrote about his superhuman ability to not get injured, despite never looking after his body. Well, guess what?!
I knew it. I bloody knew it. I knew that when I wrote in my column a couple of months ago that I didn’t get injured, despite not doing any stretching or taking the remotest care of my body, I would immediately get injured. And yes, I have. The God of Triathlon looked down upon my conceited crowing and thought ‘I’ll have him’, and has smote me with a divine kick up my arrogant arse, or more specifically, up my arrogant foot.
The injury in question is a tear to my posterior tibial tendon which, for the uninitiated, goes down the inside of your foot and underneath your heel, and I acquired it by unwisely injecting pace into the last lap of the Warwickshire Cross Country Championships. I’d pulled my usual trick of starting as ponderously as a narrowboat, then slowly increased my pace up to ramming speed in time for the last mile, and it was working beautifully as I sailed serenely passed lines of knackered rivals and, more importantly, team mates.
However, with half a lap to go I spied my clubmate José not far ahead. Scenting Spanish blood, I pursued him with unseemly vigour and soon overtook him, rubbing it in by shouting ‘OLÉ!’ as I passed. About 30 seconds later, and less than 1km from the end, something went twang in my foot and the pain shot up my leg, along my spine, rattled round my teeth and exited my mouth in the form of a loud profanity.
Ordinarily I might have hop/jogged to the finish line to minimise any further damage, but having just mocked Galicia’s finest I couldn’t let him back past, so I staggered on to the finish ahead of him, screaming obscenities with every shortening stride. Once there, I lay on the floor groaning for a while, to the general indifference of my team mates. When I got up, I did a passable impression of a pissed-up flamingo by stumbling about while trying to get changed on one leg. I then limped impressively back to my car wondering why I’d parked so bloody far from the start. As my old dad would’ve said: ‘Son, that s**t you’re drowning in is yours.’
Some weeks on I’m still in pain, and training is restricted to swimming and the dreaded turbo trainer. I’m the first to admit that I’m very bad at being injured, because I’m restless, fidgety and because I have time on my hands – time to notice things that I otherwise wouldn’t have considered. For example:
01 Absolutely everyone else in the world is out cycling and running, and all of them are doing it right past my house. To make matters worse, I live on the Coventry half-marathon course, and it’s in a few weeks’ time, so it seems like half the city is deliberately trolling me with their relaxed, pain-free gait.
02 With every day of enforced indolence I can feel myself becoming more blancmange-like, with areas of my body that I thought were once toned now feeling decidedly spongy.
03 No one is interested in my injury or how painful it is. Once they’ve established it isn’t contagious, the field in which they grow their tosses is barren. This is fair enough though, because that’s my reaction to anyone else carping on about their injury.
04 You don’t realise how often you use a particular muscle until it hurts. I had no idea that your posterior tibial tendon was an essential component in tasks like standing still, picking up milk bottles, throwing balls for your dog, or putting the bins out.
05 I have no life outside tri. Taking away my ability to run and cycle has seen me prowling round the house looking for jobs to do in order to fill the limitless time I have on my hands. I’ve even cleaned and serviced the dishwasher.
Anyway, I’ll finish by saying that as you head out to ride or run freely through the springtime, sunlit country lanes, spare a thought for me, sitting here with a bag of peas on my foot, musing that this isn’t the first time in my life my posterior has got me into trouble.
MARTYN BRUNT
Martyn is tri’s foremost average athlete and is living proof that hours of training and endless new kit are no substitute for ability.
“I lay on the floor groaning, to the general indifference of my team mates”