Achilles Rupture Recovery

Typically, I try and get up early on Saturday to do this ‘training hike’ in the relative coolness of the morning. This week, however, after staying up on Friday (again), and having promised to have breakfast with my partner, I pushed it to the afternoon … meaning I ended up hiking at temperatures around the high 20’s C (low 80’s F). Still, it’s mostly in a forest area, so it was actually fine – in fact, I had only planned on 5 rounds, but felt good at the end of the 5th so pushed on and did 6. At the end of the 6th round, my soleus let me know it was enough 😅.

What I did manage to do was pick a soundtrack with a gradually increasing BPM. I had wrongly assumed it stayed more or less constant wrt BPM … I wasn’t really sure how reliable the cadence counter on my cell phone is, now I know it doesn’t cope well with me taking my cell out of my pocket (most of the little downward blips are me doing this); at any rate, by the 4th round I was thinking, this REALLY seems faster; by the fifth I thought, this is turning into a fast march 😅 … so at the ‘lap end’ I skipped back to the beginning, and, yeah, it kicks off at around 122 BPM and was up to 138 by the time I ‘reset’ it – tricked myself nicely with that one 🤣!

No significant side effects the next day – mild discomfort on pushing dorsiflexion, same place as always (front outer ankle joint); as usual, 20+ ankle dances, 10+ mildly weighted seated calf raises plus 10+ DLRs with tennis ball clamped for symmetry pretty much banished this.

Sunday morning saw me doing, in effect, 2 rounds with my partner as we went up to the top of the mountain where there is a Bavarian guest house which serves breakfast with a wonderful view of the Alps … and this was zero problem. In fact, the way there is laced with tree roots, large stones, etc. plus stairs … which I ran down then back up, with my partner filming – THAT felt good!

Settling down into the ‘speedy paces’ on Monday and the ‘easy volume’ run on Thursday … still not very good at pacing myself, going too fast, too hard on the speedy paces part. Nevertheless, the 5k time is slowly coming down.

Of most note was the first post-injury 10k run on Thursday – at 1hr 20mins (7:58min/km) I’m hardly breaking any records 😅, but that’s not the point here. Rather, I wanted to push the volume up to this second significant ‘milestone’ distance at a slow pace (where I can still hold a conversation -> 120 BPM average) so that I can see how I progress over the next weeks and months. Logically, as my weight goes down and my fitness goes up, I should see the time go down as the average pace goes up.

I intend to keep this combination of 2 runs a week with a total volume of 15km for a few weeks to give muscles and tendons a chance to stabilise … particularly as I think I might be developing plantar fasciitis on my ‘unaffected’ side 😬.

Nothing specifically monumental to note … but having had a number of spills in the meantime, even from the top, and being close to finishing more than one 7er (never managed one of these before, also not pre-injury), I can honestly say I’m basically back to ‘normal’ … with potential to grow, with slowly increasing finger strength and gradually reducing weight.