Counting down the days.

A monkey wrench in the plans.

The Berryman Adventure Race is a little over two weeks away. I am very excited about it still, despite some recent events that have placed a serious damper on my training efforts. From sickness, death, and injury it has just about all happened in the last few weeks. My dad has been in the hospital since around the first part of June as the result of a brain tumor and surgery to remove it. He was doing very well after a few weeks, but has since had pneumonia about a dozen times, been on and off of the ventilator, and ultimately ended up with a trach. I definetly have not been able to see him as much as I should so it has not taken too much of my time, but emotionally it has been very draining. Also my best friend with whom I grew up, his brother passed away unexpectedly a few weeks ago and so it has just been a depressing time lately. On top of this just over two weeks ago, I was stepping down off of the tractor while doing some farm work and sprained my ankle. When I say this I don't mean just a little either. We have all rolled our ankle and just went back on our way doing our thing. I was instanly nauseated, pale, and sweaty after this happened. I had to sit down and just take it easy for several minutes before I was able to get back on the tractor. I limped around on it the rest of the day and built fence, knowing full well that it was probably swelling all the while. Later in the evening when I got home for the day I could barely get my boot off due to the swelling. I got my boot off and didn't really look closely until Crystal said something about it. It was very swollen, and painful to the touch. I wrapped it in an ace bandage and headed out to the bowling alley for my Tuesday night league. Within a day or two the nasty bruising came, and I kept wrapping it. This was all over two weeks ago, and until the end of last week when I took the advice of Ken Chappell, and purchased some KT Tape, it seemed to be slow healing. But now it is feeling a lot better and I am going to be running at full strength soon. I haven't lost much time off of my bike, I have been able to ride pretty much unaffected by the injury.

This picture is from about 36 hours afterwards.

No, I did not go to the doctor. I don't know for sure if there was any actual damage done, but if I was guessing..... I would say that I probably tore or severely sprained some tendons. I just hope I can keep from spraining it at the Berryman Adventure race. After that I can take it easy on the running and just focus on riding in preparation for the Berryman Epic.