My left leg recovered fully in the first week of December, and I had a very successful training night running 5 poles (pulling the hose reel the length of the track) in a row. This is second only to a straight sprint in stressing the leg, and all was well, even after the 5th run. With 10 days to go, I was looking forward to competition.
Then last Monday, I managed to trip down the front steps at home and pulled my right quads. I don't know how I managed to do that, I doubt I could if I tried. With only 6 days before the competition, there was no time to recover and balance that with final practice.
Yesterday was the day of the first competition. A quick test run first thing yesterday morning confirmed that I would be on the sidelines for the day. Knowing that it was unlikely I would be running, I prepared the video camera, and made plans to record our team's runs. The result is now on YouTube. Enjoy! :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7ITDeTSJjoThe good news is that without the pressure of training, the leg is healing rapidly, and I should be back to 100% in 2-3 weeks. Today was a good day at the gym. Unfortunately, I've also had success with the video camera, so I might have to train someone else to shoot video when I'm running.
P.S. I'm now totally hooked on using a Mac for video editing. The software design makes it a lot easier. The only tricky part was the picture in picture, because I had to manually synchronise the two videos for it to make sense. Shooting those runs was an interesting exercise too, as I had a camera in each hand pointed in different directions! :)
