So at the NJ State Tri two weekends ago, I stepped on a rock and rolled my left ankle with about a quarter mile to go. I ran through the finish, then hobbled over to the paramedics to find my ankle ballooning up like crazy. Black and blue the next night. Doctor said six weeks when I went to see her the day after that.
I have Timberman coming up, but I’m pretty much resigned to the fact that I won’t be doing it (hopefully will be doing the swim and the bike though… maybe…). My main race is IM Florida so I don’t want to come back too fast and have the injury linger. So all I’ve been doing since getting hurt is some upperbody strength work, core work, and swimming with a pull buoy.
Any ideas on what else I can do for cardio work beside the swimming? I feel like I’m already losing my fitness (and I’m going crazy!). I can walk without limping now (but I still wear an aircast-type thing), but it’s still tender and swollen a little bit. I’m pretty sure I can’t hop on an elliptical machine yet, though I think I’m going to try cycling on a trainer in a tiny gear next week sometime if it’s feeling OK.
Any ideas for other things I can do to stay fit would be much appreciated. Thanks!
I have sprained my ankle 2x this year. Both times, my coach recommended swimming. He would have me warm up with a few minutes just treading watter in the deep end and then off I would go. It would really help to loosen the ankle and keep my range of motion. I found that cycling didn’t bother it (for me) and after about 2 weeks off, I was allowed to run with a lace up ankle brace.
My ankle was quite swolen and a little black / blue. It does sound like yours might have been more severe than mine.
Cool. Thanks for the idea. I should try running the pool soon. I’m afraid it’d still be too much movement on my ankle for now, but I should try that next week maybe.
There was a thread a few weeks ago where someone mentioned that his/her PT did some kind of voodoo on a sprained ankle and the swelling went down tremendously.
My chiropractor also did some things to a sprained ankle I had 2 years ago that made it seem to heal better. At least the mobility seemed to be increased. It involved a couple of minutes of massage at the site of the sprain, and then a tug at my heel to get it to “click.”
Do you mean an aircast while water running? I don’t think that’s a good idea becaues the aircast that I’m wearing now is very big and bulky. When I aquajog, my ankle does move so if you want to keep it immobilized, tape it up pretty well or wear some sort of brace that is much, much smaller than an aircast.
My coach told me yesterday that water running will not get your heart rate up as high as land running and you won’t feel like you got as good of a workout, but he said that he saw a study that compared land runners versus water runners and there was no detriment to the VO2max and LT of the aquajoggers versus the land lubbers.
Yeah, my aircast won’t immobilize the up and down movement of my foot. I think that type of movement would aggravate it while aquajogging. I hadn’t thought about just taping it up and hopping in the pool though. That’s a good idea.
I sprained my ankle this winter and the only thing I couldn’t do is swim- I could tape it/brace it and run and bike after a week or so, but swimming was really painful for about 3months. The only way to swim was with tape and a brace for lateral stabilization. Anyway, if it hurts when you swim, you ought to brace it. Good luck