the Perfect Preparation

I started my preparation for the Stockholm Marathon by going to Germany with a few mates from school for the second edition in the series of unofficial KY Trippi travel-club events and I think it actually could've been a decent way for me to prepare for the marathon. Moderate (yeah right) alcohol usage, plenty of nutritious food and a decent amount of walking - relaxed good times in general - wouldn't have done any harm especially with so many days left before the start. It's just that my right calf got extremely sore probably somewhere between running away from the credit card thieves and crackheads of Central Hamburg and climbing over walls in order to enter a private football fields at 2 am.

I first thought it was only the muscle being tired and needing rest or maybe a small first unnoticed injury picked up from the last football training. When the calf got more and more sore while walking more and more as well I started to get anxious about it's recovery.

Finally when returning back to Finland after three nights totaling less than 8 hours of sleep I decided to go to Orto-Lääkärit medical station straight away in order to find out why it all of a sudden hurts so much to even walk now.

They had been very professional when I had been there previously for different injuries, but now the treatment I got wasn't really worth the 140€/20min price tag. The doctor just said that there's something wrong with the calf muscle without any clear diagnosis and that full recovery will happen sooner or later. Then he injected the muscle with some liquid called Bicain which actually at least had some sort of an placebo effect for a few moments.

Even though I pretty much can't run at all at the moment I still haven't given up and I'm still packing my running equipment and planning on running. Not even making it to the finish line would be - first of all pretty difficult to explain to people who don't know about my previous running history - and also shameful for myself after promising results on previous running events this spring.

I'm now constantly eating ibuprofen and rubbing some voltaren-gel to the leg hoping for it to get better. There's still more then a full day before I have to finally decide whether to board the ship or not. Or actually I'll probably board the ship anyway, enter the starting line and run until DNF!