Berlin Marathon: My Left Foot

Nice toenail

I'm injured again. It feels like gout or arthritis in the joint of the second toe of my left foot but the fact that it flared up a couple of hours after my second personal trainer session this morning makes me wonder. 

The 8am session was great. A really good hour of body conditioning; burpees, tyre jumps and flips, round-the-world push-ups, battle ropes - all brilliantly demonstrated by Yasmine. She's good at encouraging and cajoling without overdoing it. I huff and puff and feel ashamed of my bony girl arms but I can feel myself getting stronger. 

I went home feeling pleased with myself and got to work just as news was breaking of a terror decapitation in France closely followed by a tourist massacre courtesy of a lunatic jihadist in Tunisia. 

It was straight into organisation mode; getting Hala on the road to Lyon, sending updates to Max on air in Berlin, shuttling between the Newsdesk and the gallery, scrambling writers and briefing programme teams and Atlanta bosses. 

But I still felt fit and good. I even printed out my ParkRun barcode thinking I could do my first 5km run at Wormwood Scrubs tomorrow. 

The toe joint twinges started about an hour later and got gradually worse. By 12.30pm I'd popped a couple of ibuprofen with my Leon chicken tagine and I was starting to limp. By 4pm the familiar pain was pretty constant and the drugs weren't working. 

The rolling coverage meant I also had to biff an evening dash to Henley to watch Joseph's boat attempting to qualify for the regatta next week. A big blow on a lovely summer Friday. 

Did I tweak something during the session, could it have been stress related or was it just a routine acute explosion of gout? I limped out of the office at 7.30pm and despaired all the way home via the 207 bus to avoid the walk from the tube station. 

And now I sit with an ice block on my foot having swallowed a couple of colchicine tablets while enduring the lamentable Mark Ronson massacring The Smiths at Glastonbury. 

 I really hope the tabs kick in tonight. If not it's a weekend without training but I'd rather it happened now than the Friday before the marathon. 

And the best news of all - Joseph did it. Yay!