The sun was shining on Monday and as the nights are gradually getting darker I took the chance to head into the parks for a bit of a longer run on the trails, my shoulder was stiff again, just uncomfortable though rather than painful so I ran through it and as always the stunning surroundings kept me distracted! Just over 7 miles at a nice easy pace was a great start to the week.
That’s where the greatness ends, the ache turned into a throbbing pain overnight, stretching and painkillers didn’t help so I was pleased when the physio could fit me in at short notice, 45 minutes of agony later and although I could feel the bruises already starting to grow the pain I had gone in with was much improved, he did try to explain what was wrong (something about a trapped nerve) but to be honest I was concentrating hard on not screaming so didn’t really pay much attention, no lifting for a couple of days but other than that no restrictions.
That meant a change of plans for the week though as no lifting was going to mean no crossfit, took the rest of Tuesday easy as I was a bit tender, it did give me a chance to do some food prep for the rest of the week though so not a complete loss.
Feeling a bit better on Wednesday and decided that if I couldn’t lift then I’d try some running efforts and after receiving a reminder that the Cross Country League starts in a couple of weeks I decided those efforts would be up-down hill repeats on grass. This was a mistake, all my training has been built around easy runs with CrossFit filling the speedwork gap, what I should have done was hill repeats at an easy pace, driving up hill requires a lot of work with your arms and even though I only did 5 repeats (about 1 mile of efforts) I could feel my shoulder tightening.
No surprise what Thursday brought with it then, nowhere near as much pain as Tuesday but my movement was definitely restricted, still psychologically I felt good about the session even if I knew deep down it was probably a mistake, no training though, not risking it.
I spent a bit of time on Friday working out a route that would mimic some of the common parts of the local XC races, one of the things I’ve found with XC is that mentally it’s tough, all the courses we use are structured around laps, the mens race is usually 3, so whatever part of the course you find tough you know that you have the exact same thing coming again and again. I wanted it to be all on grass though as this was going to be about running the gradients and more importantly getting used to laps again, I eventually settled on a strange route round the schools playing fields, each lap would be 1.2 miles and have a couple of hills of varying gradients. 
4 laps would take me nicely to 5 miles, not that surprisingly even though I ran at a pretty even pace for each lap this was a really tough session, in all honestly I found it way tougher than I’d planned and now I’m really nervous about how I’m going to manage next weeks race.
That was all the training for the week, only 3 sessions but each one felt worthwhile even if they were all a little off plan!
The plan for next week is
Monday – CrossFit
Tuesday – 5k Run
Wednesday – CrossFit
Thursday – 4m Run
Friday – REST
Saturday – Cross Country – NEHL Race 1 – Wrenkton
Sunday – REST
Trying2Tri 