I didn’t notice it too much during the day yesterday because I spent most of it sitting on my butt in my office, but the inside of my left ankle is still really tender.

This is upsetting for two reasons: 1) its impact on my physical activity (no running, very limited lifting/strength training) 2) I have a long weekend off from work starting today and now I don’t know if I’ll be able to do any of the things I was hoping to do.

In an effort to take it easy and allow my ankle to heal up, I skipped the scheduled 4-mile run last night and cycled on my trainer instead.  

[Above: a sophisticated device for generating GALLONS of sweat without any forward motion occurring.  Rube Goldberg would be proud.]

It’s difficult to determine what an equivalent workout on the trainer would be to a specific run protocol, but I finally  decided to bike for the equivalent time that an average easy 4-mile run would take.

You can see that my Garmin didn’t record a speed or distance.  I have a speed/distance sensor that works in conjunction with the cadence sensor but I’m still on the fence about its utility.  A lot of the online information says that for mechanical trainers (as opposed to power meter enabled or computer/software interface enabled trainers) are much too susceptible to gearing changes for the distances recorded by sensor systems to matter.  In the past I’ve used the distance sensor and tracked the distance just for the psychological comfort of complete data screens.  I’m not sure I like the gaping holes in my summary screen when I don’t track distance.  I’ll have to review some of my old data and do some more trolling on the Slowtwitch forums.

I’m off to obsess over my ankle and ruminate over the potential collapse of my (fitness) dreams due to pain in a single, isolated strip of tissue.  Have a great weekend!