Getting hurt

I'm talking about the human being injured, not the dog.

Around the end of the year we had a fun match at the building. It was cold in there, and about halfway through my first run I felt my right calf pop. I'd pulled a muscle. It wasn't too bad, in fact I went ahead and ran on it. It felt fine a couple of days later when I went to a New Year's day exercise class, until it popped again halfway through. I sort of muddled through the rest of that and, once again, it was perfectly fine within a couple of days; until I popped it AGAIN the next week in Aerobics class.

So I scaled back dramatically on my exercise and seriously began to rehab it. And it worked. I've been back to full-intensity exercise for six weeks.

The other night I was once again at our building, getting ready to start a new class with a new instructor. It was brisk but not terrible in the building. I was the first to try the sequence, and she wanted me to run with Zipper. I put him down, took three running steps, and felt excruciating pain in my right calf. I'd torn the calf muscle. I could not continue on, in fact I could barely hobble off the floor.

I was entered all three days at Lake St. Louis this weekend and, of course, that was impossible. My calf isn't surgical, and I can walk on it, carefully, but I can't do anything else. Nothing like watching over $100 in entry fees go down the drain.

Looking back, it's obvious to me that I am not warming up my calf muscles adequately. I *had* done some warmups, but obviously not the right kind or enough. If my muscle hadn't been cold, I wouldn't have torn it. I'm sharing my tale of woe to remind you all to warm *yourselves* up, to solicit ideas on good warmups that can be done at shows, and to share that I've decided to go with a Personal Trainer for awhile and I will share any ideas he/she comes up with.

It occurs to me that stretching at shows, for humans, can be difficult. Static stretching is bad for you before exercise, dynamic stretching is best. But the recommended dynamic stretching of jogging, etc. requires more room than you may have ringside. And ring delays can make things difficult as well. Getting the timing down can be problematic.

Anyway, it's been sort of a bummer of a weekend. Please be careful out there and warm yourself up as well as your dog!