Blown Out Calf

Two weeks ago I went for a run and got what felt like a cramp in my calf. A few days after the run I was walking down a flight of stairs and had this feeling like something in my calf got crushed and ruptured. It was unexpectedly painful and I was hobbling for the rest of the day. I decided to lay off it until I felt better. Last weekend my calf felt marginally better and I tried to run on Saturday and Sunday, both attempts lasted less than a quarter mile. There are two problems with stopping running. First, running is how I combat stress and maintain some sense of equanimity. Second, I'm training for the half marathon next week in Nashville. Taking several weeks off from training in the month before the event seems sub-optimal. 

I'm writing about this now because I just went for a 5 miler and my calf is pretty unhappy. I was limping after the run. I don't entirely know what to do. Should I just keep training in the hopes that if I run gingerly, I wont aggravate things? Should I keep resting and hope that running thirteen miles after three weeks of not running wont be too much of a shock to my system? The kicker is this: This is the first year that I'm running the half marathon, and how I do this year will determine how I get staged next year (this is what I've been told from friends who've run it several years in a row.) On the sign up sheet I put down a time corresponding to an eight minute mile. I feel that, with a healthy calf and sufficient training, this is a reasonable goal. With a bum calf and not so much training an eight minute mile might be beyond me. 

This is one of those situations where I need to recognize that there are certain circumstances that are simply outside my control. My effort to run the half may just be a wash, and there may not be anything I can do about that. 

On an unrelated note, I gave a talk in the partial differential equations (PDE) seminar yesterday. It went mostly well, several professors told me that I did a good job and that the material was engaging. I was encouraged to consider a career in PDEs. I was happy to give the talk because it was the most thorough presentation of the technical machinery my advisor and I have developed. Most of the talks I've given to date have been half an hour or less and the audience has been so broad that I can do little more than describe the setting and roughly what the results are. The shortcoming of Friday's talk is that I had probably two hours of material to present and I was nervous. When I get nervous, I go faster. A professor asked me explicitly to cover the material more slowly. 

What is most striking is that I look back at my posts from pre-Blogger days and see that I was pretty worried about making it through my first year of grad school and that I've come quite some way from there.  When I stop to think about it, it makes me feel good.