Holy fractured femur

So my last blog ended with a bit of uncertainty about my mystery thigh/hip pain so I had an MRI and guess what? My femur was fractured. No wonder it hurt so much after Samoa…. It was a weird pain though so the MRI findings were quite unexpected. 

Here is an example of how amazing technology is – I walked out of the MRI and texted my doctor friend who immediately looked up my images on the interweb and was able to tell me what he saw.  The official report came the next day which was mostly what he said just in more detail.  So while it wasn’t the desired diagnosis at least I didn’t have to wait for long to find out.  Although I think even my untrained eye would have suspected something was going on in my femur when I looked at the CD of images when I got home.

Broken

So it was a bit depressing but I had already had 5 weeks off running by the time I found that out and it had seemed to turn a bit of a corner ie no pain with walking or any other time and I could do a few hops without any problems. 

So fast forward to now (sitting on the plane en route to Honolulu with Ironman in 9 days time) and I have progressed from half an hour of 30sec jog/30sec walk up to 30mins of running with one minute of walking every now and then with no issues.  I didn’t think that 6 weeks off running would be enough especially considering how hot the MRI was at 5 weeks but I have eased into it and it has been fine.  I still did my long runs in the pool which hopefully has given me a bit of endurance and hopefully I can get in a 60min run with a bit of walking when we arrive in Kona.

I’m not really sure what will happen on race day (even if I was fit and able then I wouldn’t either though…) but I am hoping to be able to run/trot most of it and walk the aid station which are every mile so that equates to quite a bit of walking.  But don’t you people at home worry – I will finish this time.  Obviously if it starts to be a problem I will walk but walking a marathon would take so long so let’s hope that isn’t the case.  And the fracture was in the upper shaft of my femur not the neck of the femur for any medical people out there, so not as tricky.

So not really ideal but almost a better situation than four years ago when I came over to the Big Island with a pain in the back of my leg which I was trying to ignore and didn’t want to tell anyone how bad it was and didn’t know what it was.  Now I am pain-free and the most which is looming over me is not being run-fit.

I am a bit disappointed in myself as an athlete for having yet another stress fracture and hate the thought of all the sports physicians at Unisports using me as an example of the female athlete triad which they have done in the past.  And of other athletes saying “oh Jo has got ANOTHER stress fracture, she needs to eat better/gain weight/train less/stop doing this to her body”.  But the fact of the matter is that I have had a bone density scan which was ok for someone my size (according to the endocrinologist), I did put on at least 2kg since my last stress fracture (for a 41kg person 2kg is quite a lot), and I was only running about 45km per WEEK when this happened so there you have it.  I don’t really understand it.

But anyway enough about my physical and mental problems.

The rest of Kona training has gone well with 3 meaty 6.5hr rides under our belts including a ride to the Coromandel and ferry back where I managed to smack my knee into my aerobar pad 10mins into the ride which made the rest of the 6hrs20 rather painful and then I couldn’t bend it properly for a few days.  In fact that has been a bit sore in my return to running which is ironic.

Kezzle and his mid-ride sausage...

Taddy admiring the view. NZ in winter...

J-rad making friends on the ferry

Swimming has been going well and we ended our Kona swim campaign with a super special Ironman set of 38x100’s.  Nice.

And amongst all of this we packed up our crappy little rented house and moved into our brand new house which we own and it is amazing.  While everyone was recovering from their business end training two weekends before Kona we were lifting and moving and cleaning and unpacking – I had DOMS the next day from squatting down and cleaning the skirting boards, we were sore before we even started our  last long ride.

SUN!

But it was all worth it because now we are in our beautiful new, clean and warm house and we have it to come back to which should help to combat post Ironman/Hawaii depression.

Next update from KONA!

I'm going to Hawaii!!