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I was playing racquetball at LA Fitness on Wed night with Mark and Ryan and got accidentally hit in the head. My protective glasses caught the brunt of the force and I lucked out that only the string portion of the racket directly hit my skin. Unfortunately, the string portion flying at 60 MPH was enough to some create cuts on my forehead. The cuts was initially bleeding fairly quickly and one of the LA Fitness workers saw me and told me to head to the front desk where they had a medical kit. I walked over to the desk and asked the two women working there if I could have the medical kit. One responded by saying something like “ohmygod! ohmygod! I can’t stand blood! You handle it!” and waving her arms. The other woman looked at me and after about 30 seconds said I should probably go get a towel. I walked over to the locker room to take a look.

When I first looked in the mirror, I was a bit concerned because a lot of blood had gathered around my left eye, and I wasn’t sure what the damage was. I used some water and paper towels to clean up the blood and the cuts didn’t look as bad as I feared; there were two slightly ragged cuts about 1/2″-3/4″ long on my forehead ,and a bruise/bump was already forming around the cuts. Mark and Ryan popped into the locker room a few seconds later. An LA Fitness staff member (who apparently CAN handle the sight of blood) helpfully brought some gauze, tape, and alcohol swabs. I cleaned the wounds with the alcohol and taped the gauze over the cuts. When we checked a few minutes later, the bleeding had almost completely stopped.

We had a bit of a discussion on whether it was worth going to an emergency room to have a doctor determine if stitches were necessary. I decided I should go to the emergency room since if I didn’t go and the cuts did not heal cleanly, I would regret it. Ryan lives within two blocks of the Pinnacle Health Hospital in Harrisburg, so he kindly offered to wait in the ER with me.

We drove to Ryan’s and walked into the ER. There were about 25 people waiting, all in various states of discomfort and/or boredom. One person looked like they were having a migraine attack (which made me feel bad since there were some screaming kids in the waiting area too). The triage desk had a sign saying to tell the triage nurse if you had something really serious (chest pain, etc), otherwise take a number and wait to get triaged. It took about an hour for my number to get called. I went into the interview room and the nurses said that for my very minor injury I would get “fast-tracked” and it shouldn’t take long. They took down my basic name/contact info and my blood pressure,pulse, and temperature. They thought I would also get a tetanus shot since my last one was decades ago. I head back to the waiting area to get called again.

About 20 minutes later, a hospital worker called out my name. Sweet! Faster than I thought. At this point Ryan headed home. I followed the hospital worker about 15 feet and we went to a window where she took my health insurance info and co-pay ,and finished the admittance process. She then gave me a restaurant style buzzer and sent me back to the waiting area. Not quite as sweet.

After another 20 minutes went by, a nurse walked in and called out my name. Apparently the buzzer information wasn’t entered correctly. The nurse escorted me back to one of the medical examination areas. A doctor came by a few minutes later and took a look at my head. He said the cuts were pretty superficial and he would just use some steri-strips to close them.  He came back a few minutes later and put the strips on and then the nurse came over and injected me with the tetanus shot.   The shot itself didn’t hurt at all, but the nurse warned me that it would probably ache the next day or two and I might run a slight fever.  At that point I just needed to sign a few pieces of paper and was able to head home.

Thursday update: I’m happy I can’t really see any bruising, but there is a definite bump  around the cuts.  The cuts don’t hurt unless I am wrinkling my brow.  My left shoulder where I got the tetanus shot is VERY sore.    I think I am going to lay off the aerobic exercise for a few days so I don’t accidentally cause the bandages to come off due to sweating. Hopefully I’ll be feeling better after the weekend.

Well, I’m still with the FIRST plan in spirit, but definitely not in practice this week.

Tuesday: The schedule called for a speed workout, but I was in too much lower back pain from Monday’s racquetball extravaganza to consider any type of workout . I took the day off.

Wednesday: I went to LA Fitness and did 45 minutes of the hill routine on a recumbent bike. I like the hill routine on the Life Fitness bikes because it is somewhat like an interval session (after a few minutes into the workout, the bike alternates 1 minute of higher-intensity fake hills with 1 minute of lower-intensity flat equivalents). I ended up catching up with Nate Powell for a bit who was also on a bike.

Thursday: I hit LA Fitness and did a mile warm up, 5 medium-tempo miles in 34:43 (or 35:49 depending on if I went by the treadmill or footpod data), and then walked for a few minutes to cool down. After scarfing down a bit of my Neato Burrito left over from lunch, I played an hour of racquetball with Mark and Ryan which was a blast. My serve is definitely improving and I’m making less silly errors of not getting back to center court after a shot, but my game still has a long way to go.

Friday: Felt good but took the day off workout-wise (unless you count bowling, which I don’t).

Saturday: I met up with Jon Laman in the morning and we ran for just over 10 miles at a pretty easy pace. We started at City Island, caught the Greenbelt near PennDOT, and then ran back through Harrisburg. It was nice to run with a friend and not be worrying about hitting any specific pace. This was my first time running outside since December 2nd when I ran on the Appalachian Trail with Jon. This clearly wasn’t in the FIRST training plan, but it made me happy.

MB Link

Sunday: Hit the trusty Conewago trail to do the recommended FIRST long run of 9 miles @ 7:25. I was feeling a tiny bit stiff in my left quad from yesterday so I decided to start with a half-mile warm up before the hard effort. The stiffness faded during the 5:03 warm up, and I started the “official” part of the run. Since I was already a half-mile into the trail I decided to make the long-run effort 9.5 miles so my mile splits would be in sync with the half-mile markers. The first 8 miles clicked by in 7:28, 7:14, 7:12, 7:17, 7:20, 7:15, 7:07, 7:13. I was feeling pretty good with 1.5 miles to go, so I started picking up the pace a little bit, but still felt like there was an extra gear reserve. The 9th mile was in 6:53, and the last half-mile a tiny bit faster at a 6:50 pace.

No question about it, this was by far my best pace/effort ratio for a long run since I started running. Towards the end of the run I was playing with the idea of adding on an extra 3.6 miles to try smashing my half-marathon PR (1:43:55) . Caution won out, and I decided it wasn’t worth the risk of getting injured or being too fatigued to have a good workout for a while.

Stats for the 9.5 miles of focused running:

Average pace: 7:12

Average Heart Rate: 163

MB Link

On Monday I played cutthroat racquetball with two friends from work.  I figured it would be a lot of fun and count as a easy cross-training workout, leaving me in reasonable shape to do my scheduled hard workout the next day (which worked out fine last week).  Well, I think my enjoyment of the sport was writing checks my body couldn’t pay, since I ended up playing for almost 2 hours and 15 minutes and I was exhausted at the end of it.  Today my joints/muscles (and lower back especially) are really sore.  I hope I’m feeling good enough to run tomorrow night, but at this point it is still a bit up in the air.

I definitely need to set a time limit on racquetball if I want to ensure I can get a solid running workout in the next day.