Never Run in Flip Flops

I can’t believe it, my body has mutinied. If I was a horse I’d have been shot by now.

I was heading off for a meeting with my Gestor and realised I’d forgotten my ‘autonimos’ slips (extortionate social security payment receipts). As I was already going to be late (although, as Andy pointed out later, you can never be late in Tenerife), I broke into a sprint (okay, more like a Peter Kay ‘dad run’), not the easiest thing to do in flip flops. I’d taken maybe a step when it felt as though somebody had embedded a knife in my right calf and I pulled up like a lame horse; something had gone.

After limping painfully to the gestor and back (via the car obviously), I thought I’d better check out my symptoms on the net. I found a lot of people with exactly the same symptoms. Seems I have a calf strain. The funny thing is that it appears to be an injury which only affects athletes as everybody else who’d posted queries was a sportsperson.
How I’ve managed to pick up a sportspersons injury amused Andy no end; I can only assume that my calf muscles had become ‘honed’ during all the hill and mountain trekking we’ve been doing over the last 2-3 weeks. So, when my ‘finely tuned’ legs broke into a trot without the necessary warming up period, my calf muscle popped like a tightly coiled spring.

You see if you slob about and don’t do any exercise, this sort of thing aint going to happen to you. There’s definitely a moral to this tale.

Following advice from the web, I spent the evening with ice packs strapped to the back of my leg at regular intervals, which made me feel a bit like David Beckham (the only thing we’ll ever have in common), to reduce the swelling and stop internal bleeding (I didn’t like the sound of that).
The recovery time for this sort of injury seemed a bit vague – should be walking properly within a couple of weeks, but the websites I looked at said it’ll apparently take a couple of months before I can play competitive tennis or baseball again.

This came as an unexpected, but pleasant, surprise, cos I couldn’t play either before.