Race Coverage

Ted's Season - Part IV - Buffalo & My Stupid Ankle...

Wednesday, 15 November 2023 00:10

By Ted Treise

In Minnesota, the local tri season starts in June at the Buffalo triathlon. I raced it last year and had blast with the MN crew. This year leading into it though, I had a tight interior ankle issue. It was fine in the sense that I get a little limp going through my warm up, but in the main-set, things were grooving. After it would be a bit sore, but nothing some Advil vitamins couldn’t solve. As someone who trains 20+ hourrs a week, nothing is ever perfect. My shoulder is sore in the swim, feet hurt around hour 5 on the bike. Shit happens and I thought this is just one of those things that will go away with some dry needling at Odom. Andrew is a super healer and most things do.....

Race day came at Buffalo; the ankle was stable as things weren’t getting worse so I thought it was fine to give it a go with some tape. The worst thing would be running from the water, barefoot, to transition without shoe support. If I could get through that, the run would be fine.

he race started and one detail I’ll say about it is how physical local racing is during the swim. People are going left, right, fast slow fast. Trying to get on your left only to want to get on your right. Just swim straight everyone! We’ll all get there! It was fun. 

After the swim, I managed the questionable T1 run just fine, my bike was good holding about 330 watts, then the run started. I got up to cruising speed around 5:45 min/mile. As usual, the ankle felt a bit warm, noticeable but no pain. I was stoked how things were going and reached about the 2 mile mark. All of a sudden it was like I got shot in the ankle. Just completely let go on me and oh my, this thing hurt. I could barely walk. Thank god, super legend David Thompson was with me at the time and lent me his bike to get back to transition.

From there, Dani got me scheduled at an ortho place where I could get an x-ray that day and an MRI on Monday. To my surprise, everything came back clean and I was prescribed some rest and hopefully things would be back to normal soon.

But! They weren’t. This was my summer battle. I didn’t run for about 6 weeks had a few weeks in there where you think. ‘ok, this is the week I can run again’. After getting zooted up with run shorts, shoes; you leave the door with a heart of gold ready to return. Then get 5 steps in with wincing pain knowing full well there’s another few weeks of recovery - I was just gutted, sad how things were going. It was supposed to be MY year and here I am mid-July not running, watching races come and go. Gosh it was frustrating.

So I just stayed with the program of going to Odom, took rest as needed and eventually got to a place where I could start building. First it was 2 minutes running, 8 walking. Then 3 minutes and 7 off. A slow slow build. I got to a place where I could run for about 75 minutes at an 8 min pace. Didn’t feel great but I could do it. I really wanted to race so from here decided to give Michigan 70.3 a try. I just had an amazing open water swim race during Scott Tripp’s JJ Hill event and was excited to see how swim/bike focus would pay off. I just get a taste of racing and see how things were progressing.