there's no denying it. i'm injured. after the ten-miler last saturday, i tried to run 4 miles on monday and could only manage to hobble for 2 miles before i threw in the towl. in retrospect, i probably should have listened to my body and not even bothered with the 2 miles.

the symptom? a strained calf muscle :

"Calf problems are usually due to micro-traumas that occur with every run. A typical muscle that is exercised multiple times a week is injured on the microscopic level with every workout. These micro-injuries require to heal. As the muscle is used and the microtraumas occur, an inherit tightening or contracture takes place.

This is the body's attempt to protect the muscle to allow the necessary time for recovery. The downside of this is built in protective mechanisms that there is a reduced blood flow to the muscle, this reduced blood flow furthers the contracture or tightening.

This cycle usually leads to injury or chronic tightness and stiffness that limit a runner with regard to mileage and hard workouts. AS soon as the muscle tightness is mildly improved, most runners feel the need to get back out on the road or track as quickly as possible. This is taking a muscle that is just starting to recover and asking it to perform when it is not capable of doing so and the cycle continues."

in hindsight, i clearly wrote about impending damage after the 10 miler :

"... making the bad mental mojo that much more difficult to counter, i had to stop and stretch every mile or two because my calf muscles decided to go into slow motion charlie horses...."

in my ignorance, i was actually making the microtraumas worse by overstretching the non-damaged tissue during the lng run. strangely, the hardest part has been keeping myself from running and reinjuring myself. i've been biking around 10 miles a day, to get some conditioning, which i suppose is better than nothing.

i've been following some of ozzie gontang's [ maintainter of the running faq ] advice on massaging calves :

"First work out the knot in the calf. Sit down. To find it, put your belly of the calf muscle over the knee of the other leg. Move the knee back and forth in the belly of the calf and you should find the knot. Remember when a muscle is sore and contracts, in the contracted state it doesn't let you know it's sore, until you start to feel around.

Put your calf muscle over your knee, a railing, the back of a chair. Remember it's the back of the calf muscle. You put the belly of the muscle over the back of the chair, or railing or knee. Slowly (lovingly) rotate it back and forth, that is side to side about a inch. Slowly move(slide) the leg up or down the back of the chair, etc. so that you "lovingly massage side to side the entire belly of the calf.

Remember it you go too deep, too fast, too hard, you will only get the muscle to tighten up even more---getting the opposite of what you want."

interestingly, ozzie mentions in a few usenet posts that strains on the shin can eventually cause problems with the calves, so here's my little theory that i've constructed. after running in maine in the hills, i started feeling some relatively mild shin splints. i then made things much, much worse by making the naive decision to run 8 miles on a running track. rather than helping my shin shins, i actually put my inside [ left ] leg shin under severe strain. the strain on my shin eventually created excessive microtraumas in my calves, which led to gradual tightening of my calf. i ignored [ or rather was ignorant of ] the warning signs and overstretched and exacerbated the problem.

in the end, as always, nature won.

this week, i'm scheduled for a professional message to help get the knots out of my calf, i'll continue my biking and hopefully, maybe, start running again. slowly.