Last night, I followed my usual night-before-CrossFit-class routine: I laid out my clothes (Rogue shirt! Board shorts! Baseball cap! My lucky skullcap!), filled my water bottle, packed my gym bag, and hit the sheets. (All necessary prep has to take place the evening before my class; at 4:20 a.m., there's no way I can get my crap together.)
But less than two hours after falling asleep, a throbbing pain in my right ankle woke me up. At first, I figured my ankle sprain had just flared up again. But then, as the fog of sleep dissipated, I realized that this wasn't the ankle I sprained -- IT'S THE OTHER ONE. The healthy one. The one I can't remember injuring. The one on which I've been relying for the past month.
My (groggy) mind raced through the possibilities:
- I somehow twisted my ankle in my sleep. (Not likely.)
- I slept on it wrong. (Uh, no.)
- I can't tell my right leg from my left. (Not outside the realm of possibility.)
- Now that I'm in my late 30s, my body is falling apart. (I sure hope not.)
- My kids snuck into my room in the middle of the night and clubbed my leg with a baseball bat. (I wouldn't put it past them.)
- I've been relying heavily on (a.k.a. pounding the hell out of) my right leg ever since injuring my left, and my right ankle's finally signaling no mas. (A promising theory.)
Whatever the reason, I couldn't go back to sleep -- the pain wasn't subsiding. I tossed, turned, and tossed some more before limping into the kitchen to down a bunch of pills. (In the morning, when M got home from work, she chided me for taking a larger-than-appropriate dose. I forgot that my wife's a professional pill-pusher, and that I could've called her at the hospital in the middle of the night.)
With only two-and-a-half hours to go until my alarm was set to go off, I wimped out. Even if my ankle felt better in the morning, I figured I was going to be too sleep-deprived to join my 5 a.m. classmates at CrossFit Palo Alto, so I grudgingly sent Tim a text to let him know that I'd be missing class, and crawled back into bed.
When I finally got up this morning, I learned that I'd missed a great WOD:
"Nicole"
AMRAP in 20 minutes of:
- 400-meter run
- Max rep pull-ups
The running would've been a challenge, but I love pull-ups. And having done a Half-Nicole (back when I first started CrossFit) and a Kettlebell Nicole (six months ago), I REALLY wanted to try the real thing. Predictably, I spent all morning kicking myself for missing this workout. Regret soon turned to bitterness, and I stayed in a funk for the rest of the day.
After dinner, I decided to blow off some steam by working out in the garage. I rowed (which, oddly enough, doesn't seem to bother my ankles) -- 3 sets of 500 meters, with 1 minute rest between sets. From a physical standpoint, rowing on the erg certainly helped to burn off some energy and ease a bit of the day's tension. But mentally, I'm still pissed at myself for missing Nicole -- all because I spent half the night up nursing a dumb, inexplicable ankle flare-up.
Next time, I'm going to bed earlier. Speaking of which, I need to go crash now...
