Mid Week and Catchup

When my alarm went off this morning I seriously believed it to be the weekend. I'd slept so well that there was no way that my alarm was beeping at 5.45am, it must have been at least 8am. But it is Wednesday and my alarm was beeping at 5.45am!

Last night I got a text from my friend, you know the one who asked for a running companion for the 10k tonight. It said "Just a text to let you know that it is looking more and more unlikely that I will able to do the run tomorrow - I am having a few probs with work a the mo and may not be able to get out on time. Also doesn't help that I have done no training!"

Now the sceptic in me believes that she's bailing on the race because of the training & the bad weather... not her job which she is leaving in a few days time. I'm pretty annoyed to be honest, I've been stressing about this race for the last few weeks, knowing that I've done next to no running in June because of my tooth problems but I was going to go through with it because I'd promised to run with her. I know it shouldn't be all about running because of someone else, but I'm not that fussed about running organised races, I'm quite happy timing myself around distances we plot on a map. I'm not sure what I'm going to do about it now. I've got my running stuff & my race pack with me, so perhaps I'll just see how I feel about things at 5pm this evening when I leave work. Mr H would be dropping me off on his way home from work then would come and pick me up. I'd be at the race site about 1.5-2 hours before the race starts, so if its raining its pretty much a no go as I'll be soaked through before I even get going. Plus I'm not sure about how confident I am running cross country on wet ground, 99% of my running is on road and this race is around a bird park! It's pissing with rain at the moment so I guess I'll just wait and see.

Now the catchup elements of this post. Firstly, we did our food shop at the weekend, check this out. Yes, this is a Mars Milkshake with a Sports Cap - seriously! WTF? Now I do understand that research has been carried out that shows drinking chocolate milk after exercise can help muscle recovery, but I'm a little wary of the actual benefits of Mars Milk over other types of post-exercise drink. Not least becauethe research appears to have been carried out by organisations who would have a vested interest in this product. Looking at the Nutritional content, it appears to be rammed with calories, sugar and not an awful lot of protein for the amount of millitres. I think I'll be sticking to my protein shakes.

Onto my Physio. I had my first session on Monday and I had a bit of a wake up call really. It shocked me to see how limited my range of motions are now in my right shoulder. We are beginning with working on the inner range which means working the muscles in the area of my shoulder that do not hurt/do not hurt much which is with my arm down and moving my arm across/infront my body. The idea being that if I can strengthen areas around the areas that have been damaged, when I progress on to the outer range (90 degrees to the side of my body and up) I'll have the strength from my inner range to help support my arm.

My Physio explained that it won't be a quick process and that I will have to be careful with any other arm weights I do. She basically said she wasn't happy with me doing anything more than about 0.5-1kg apart from bicep curls when I could do heavier. The theory being that even holding something heavy in my arm is effectively pulling at the rotator cuff in my arm. So even a heavy shopping bag is pulling at my weakened socket. She compared my shoulder to my hip and explained that the only thing keeping my arm in place is a complex set of ligaments, muscles and tissue, there is no fancy ball and socket like in my hip to stop my arm falling out of place.

It was quite interesting when we were going through various comparisons of my left and right side, it turns out that because I'm quite flexible anyway, it means that my arms stretch more than the average person - this sort of injury is more likely in this type of person. It turns out that apparently 'average' people when they raise their arms to their head can only comfortably get their arms parallel with their ears, stretchy ligamented people can get their arms much further back. When I raise my arms they end up way behind my head. On the day that I injured myself, my arm was too far back and the support went.

I've come to the conclusion that I really want to get my strength back into my shoulder and that I don't want to do anything that risks damaging it further. So as of now, I'm going to be limiting the amount of arm exercises to my physio and a few other things that I'm hoping my gym instructor will help me with. I still want to work muscles, but I need to do it in a way that doesn't put extra stress pulling down on my shoulder. The only thing I can think of right now is seated bicep curls supporting my elbow. My physio just consists a few standing pushups and various exercises pulling at these rubber band things. I've got two different resistences for different exercises. Most I use quite a strong band, but there are other motions where my arm can't even pull at that without feeling discomfort. I'm having sessions approximately every 2 weeks for the forseeable future and I need to try and do my exercises about 2-3 times a day.

In the meantime whilst I'm doing my Physio, I'm going to concentrate on my running and working my middle-lower body. I'm going to have to find some clever ways of increasing resistance on my lower body without using my arms, hopefully the gym man will again help out with this. Off the top of my head I was thinking of squats holding a plate weight with both arms across my chest and doing something similar for sit ups.

Yesterdays food was much better than Monday, I still snacked a fair bit, but on much better things (fruit, Bear Granola nibbles (ah-may-zing!!), a babybel).

Today I'm back into the office so I've got things much more under control.

Breakfast: 200ml Skimmed Milk Protein Shake, 30g Jumbo Oats, 1 tsp G&B Cocoa Powder, 2 tsp Sweetener, 1 tsp Flax, 150ml Skimmed Milk, 150ml Berocca

Mid Morning: 2 Plums

Lunch: Jewelled Moroccan Cous Cous (without the Chilli), Chilli Cous Cous, Spinach, Rocket, Crudities of Carrot, Cucumber & Red Pepper.

Mid Afternoon: Babybel Light & Banana

Dinner: Turkey Salad

If I run tonight I'll also have another Protein Shake and will eat my banana much nearer to the time of my run.

Oh and finally, heres a sneak peak of my re-vamped Picnic Basket, its nearly ready!! I'm so in love with my new sewing machine, I've become such a home-maker in just one week with the addition of my KitchenAid and now my sewing machine. I was truely born in wrong era.