Being Idle Is Killing Me – Marci

I’ve been doing a lot of hiking and more recently, trail running around Granada since I started my EVS here. This is literally the perfect place for activities like this, with a million options just outside the city and you don’t even need to take the bus or have a car for a lot of them. With trail running, I’ve ran through the Sierra de Huétor and more recently (about a month ago) I ran along a famous trail called the Vereda de la Estrella in the Sierra Nevada. The latter run didn’t go so well, because I completely annihilated my knees… I went to the doctor about a week after and she said it would heal pretty quickly, but now the knees are still not okay, so I’ll be back to the doctor again to do a more in-depth look at what is wrong.

Of course, this means that I haven’t really been allowed to run for the last month, and I also couldn’t do a bunch of hikes that I’ve been planning. This is annoying on many levels. First, I am simply worried that I have done some permanent damage to my knee, which would be devastating considering how important hiking and walking is in my life. Second, I really, really love trail running and it has been great for my overall fitness. Third, I’ve already signed up for the marathon distance of the Sierra Nevada Ultra running race in July and I don’t want to chicken out. Obviously if things don’t improve, I won’t go, but it has been a huge goal of mine this year to complete that race, to prove that I can do something like this.

While I don’t know exactly what caused my injury, it definitely highlights some of the failings of the training program I’ve been doing. While it involved a lot of running with a great variety of styles and distances, like doing sprints, uphill sprints, trail runs, half-marathons and lighter runs, it was lacking cross-training that helps strengthen the knees and legs overall. Beside the running, I was doing training for arms and upper body as well as training for my core, which can all help, but are not as essential to running. I should have probably added some more exercises that strengthen the muscles around the knee, helping relieve the load on the joint. I also think that my warmup routine before runs was quite lacking.

We will see how this all pans out – I’m going back to the doctor this week for a more in-depth checkup and that will hopefully give me more answers. Hopefully, it is something that will just go away soon, and I can get back to my normal routine and prepare for the running race in July and be back to my usual hiking adventures. Sitting more or less idle, not going running or hiking, only doing some small exercises indoors has really been tough, because it is simply difficult for me to sit on my ass for this long. I love to be active, to be outside and it has really impacted my productivity and even my mood a bit for the last few weeks.

For the first two weeks it was fine… I was frustrated, but also very positive that it would heal quickly, and things would be back to normal in no time. The intense pain with walking disappeared after a week, so I no longer needed a knee brace and you couldn’t see me limp at all. I could comfortably walk around the city without a problem. I could feel my knees being not completely okay, but it didn’t really hurt much. But then the progress plateaued. That’s where it has been ever since and last weekend, it may have even got a little bit worse, but since reverted back to normal. So, I can walk without any problems, but I can feel some little pain in the knees. It doesn’t seem to be getting much worse, but it also isn’t improving. I think it is safe to say that it is time to get it checked out again.

This injury really made me reflect on how little time I have in my EVS. Not only did I have to skip a bunch of cool trail runs I wanted to do, but even worse, I had to cancel a bunch of plans for hikes in the Sierra Nevada. There were a series of really epic hikes that I’ve been dying to do ever since I first started looking at the maps of the mountain range. Last autumn I climbed Veleta (twice) and Mulhacén, as well as a bunch of smaller peaks and had some epic adventures (read about one of them HERE). I now have a new route in mind, which would go along one of the highest ridges of the Sierra Nevada, hitting all the major peaks, including Alcazaba which has been on my bucket list for a while, plus re-doing part of my old hike that was very challenging at the time. The plan was to do it this weekend, but that would have clearly been irresponsible… There were also some smaller hikes I wanted to do, which would have involved doing course-recon for the running race and doing the famous Beas de Granada – Granada hike.

So many plans, but my knee still isn’t cooperating… Even if the doctor tells me not to push running so hard and maybe skip the race, I still want to be back at hiking as soon as possible. Two months from now, I will be back in Hungary, so my opportunities for mountain adventures will go down to zero. Hungary has some nice hills, but the landscape is not exactly what you’d call “epic”. The highest peak in Hungary is 1015 meters. For comparison, the highest mountain near Granada is 3478 meters. That’s the Mulhacén, which also happens to be the highest point of mainland Spain. While I know I’ll be back to Granada in a year or two, probably it won’t be all about hiking and outdoor adventures. Making things even worse, we will move to Íllora to run youth exchanges at the end of June, so my window of opportunity for these hikes is really damn limited – basically the next 3.5 weeks, plus however much time I stay in Granada after the end of my project on the 21^st of July, which will probably be an extra week or so. But don’t get me wrong, I’m very excited about the youth exchanges. It’s just that it will really limit my chances of outdoor adventuring.

This has been by far the longest blogpost on here, but after all the posts about travelling here and there, I feel like it was time to write properly about a more personal part of my EVS experience. One that has been frustrating and difficult, showing the less happy aspects of my time here. As for what’s going to happen now? Who knows… But I’ll definitely be writing some updates about it in the near future.