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Lakes Bathrooms’ Running Man – Mike Tattam – on his latest training adventures for the London Marathon
Firstly I’d like to thank all the donors for their kind support last month: My friends from the R&PWCGS, Simon Bailey & Dave Wheatley both of Lakes Bathrooms, John Fisher, Colin Tattam, Charles Ledigo of Reisser and a special thanks to Steve and Pauline Boyer of Marsh Industries. www.justgiving.com/fundraising/mike-tattam
February was a month of real lows and highs, and ending with the Beast from the East becoming the Pest in the West.
Now if you remember in my last blog I mentioned a few reoccurring injuries and problems with my calf. Well it got worse, a lot worse! I saw physio number 2 (the running specialist) who said my injury was beyond him and I needed even more specialist running advice. So off I trotted – well walked slowly – to the Nuffield in Cheltenham where I met Dr Rod Jaques. He is a remarkable man and as you can see from the bio below he knows a thing or two about sports injuries. When I joked about my support team being now larger than Mo Farah’s he laughed and said ‘I’ll tell Mo later when I speak to him’….. and apparently he did!
Dr Rod Jaques – Director of Medical Services at the English Institute of Sport (EIS), which provides medicine and sports science services to summer and winter Olympic and Paralympic athletes. He is based in the EIS South West Region at Bath University where some of the Olympic athletes train. He attended the Atlanta, Sydney, Athens, Beijing and London Olympics with Team GB and the Kuala Lumpur and Manchester Commonwealth Games with the England Team. From 1989-2007 He was Medical Advisor to the British Triathlon Association. He lectures on many aspects of sports medicine and has published in the British Journal of Sports medicine and the Lancet.
Just before I met him he took a call from the British Winter Olympic Team in Korea where someone had fallen and injured themselves and asked for his advice….it was Katie Ormerod the British snowboarder who had broken her ankle!
He suggested I have an MRI of my back and an Ultrasound scan of my leg as he thought there were two problems. This is when he broke the news that if it was what he thought it was I would have to pull out of the London Marathon….the low point!
So no running in early Feb as I went to have an MRI and Scan and as you can see from the pictures I apparently have a degenerative back disease that means my spin is compressing and squishing the discs which effects the nerves and ultimately my legs…..creating spasms and resulting in pulling muscles.
Now I know some of you may think it is the pen that is the problem, but apparently not. The good news is that with a hard regime of muscle building around the back I will be fine to run the London Marathon, and it will help me in the future too…great! The Ultrasound scan showed that my Plantaris tendon in my leg was inflamed but with massage it would recover. The Plantaris tendon is completely redundant in the human body and 13% of people now don’t even have one. Mine is just being a pain…..literally.
And so back to running and by the end of February my weekend runs are up to 13 miles with mid-week runs of between 5 and 7 miles, I’m slowly getting back on target.
It’s tough and running in temperatures of -7 is hard…really hard but it is all for a very good cause. In today’s world it’s all too easy to be cynical about giving to charities especially after recent events with other well-known organisations but I hope you can put this to one side and help me support Child Rescue Nepal.
