On the road back....Mt Wilson 20 miles, feeling good (or how I rehab'ed a calf strain)

My recovery plan this week has been to walk in order to rehab the prima-donna calf muscle;  at the same time the idea is to keep up my foot toughness; maintain time on the feet, and strengthen my walking muscles to enable fast uphill walking in the AC100.  During the last week on weekdays  I walked  30 miles and certainly by the end of the week my walking speed had  improved.  This morning I tackled Mt Wilson:  I walked up (9.85 miles) in 2:33 -  this is as compared to the same route run last October in 2:16.    Not a heck of a lot of point burning oneself up running a 10% grade from these stats!  I'm very pleased that I clocked out solid 4 miles per hour walking given the roughly 5000 ft of climb on this route.  I lost a bit of time in the last half mile gulping down a burrito.  A couple times during the powerwalk up, I tested the calf by running on flatter sections and it had a sharp feeling to it-  no joy.

At the summit I hit the spigot to reload my bottles and started walking back.  Coming around the bush behind which the spigot is hidden I saw some of my running buddies who had come up out of Chantry for a point to point  run ending at Eaton Canyon nature center -  same as my return trip.  So I started to run back with them, having disclaimed that I might be walking back depending on how the calf felt.  Much to my surprise the prima-donna calf felt fine running downhill.  I completed the 20 mile circuit in 4:15...we took our time on the descent.  Two of my 3 friends were nursing injuries so no one was racing today.  The last mile was flat (in Eaton Canyon park) and the calf felt fine in contrast to the sharpness I'd experienced running flats in the first half of this excursion.  Go figure!  This is the second time a persistent calf strain has been worked out by a long (10 mile) walk (first time being the March walk up Mt Wilson, 2 weeks before Leona Divide)...must be that its the equivalent of a really good deep tissue massage session (that lasts 2 1/2 hours!).

Here are the guys at the end of the run at the Nature Center:

Tommorrow I plan to do Sam Merrill to Idlehour, an 18 mile out and back.