The injury on my left Achilles tendon continued to heavily influence all my sports activities in August. I had another two doctor visits and two physiotherapy appointments. Unfortunately, a limited test to return to running (as prescribed by the doctor) proved to be a little premature. The good news is that the inflammation is mostly gone. The bad news is that the Achilles is still not pain-free, there’s still less range of motion on the ankle (that I can’t seem to improve without adding to the pain, either) and adding any kind of intensity in running would probably quickly worsen my condition again at this point.

Track training: None. I didn’t even see a track during all of August.

Road&Trail Running: After a doctor visit on August 4th, I was supposed to slowly start running again. The idea was to gradually get the Achilles used to running again now that the inflammation was gone. Unfortunately, both test runs that I did (on August 8th and 11th) proved to induce too much pain even though they were slow (>6:30 min/km) and short (<30min). So the rest of the month I once again spent not running. 1h, 8km, 147m elevation.

Walking: 70km. Most of the month, I hovered at an average of around 3km each day, but with quite a few days off as well. On the last two days of the month, on vacation in Austria, I did some limited hiking (11km and 7km) which went OK.  Two thirds of the elevation covered during the month was actually during these two days. 16h21, 70km, 2304m elevation.

Cycling: Here, the month went quite well. I did 12 outings, from around 50 minutes to almost 2 hours in length. Some sessions were on the road, others in the forest. My longest ride was on August 1st, when I did 51km. In the Alps, I finished off the month with a 750m elevation climb on a crappy rental bike that showed me how much I still need to improve in the saddle (and how much better it is to ride a decent bike than a crappy free hotel rental). 15h31, 297km, 4243m elevation gain.

Total time outside: 33h

Average body weight: 82.86kg. Body fat 15.28%. Major jump up both in weight (almost 2kg) and body fat (almost 1%). Didn’t eat healthy at all, and the cycling probably burns less calories than running would.