The grotesquely swollen ankle pictured here is not a running injury. It’s a blogging injury.

How prescient was I when I identified blogging, birds and booze as my greatest marathon training vices?

Pretty fucking prescient.

Yesterday afternoon, as I put the finishing touches on a blog post about the day’s birding adventures, I got up from my desk to do something (feed the cats, probably). My right foot had fallen asleep. As I lurched forward through the narrow bed-closet corridor in our back bedroom/office, cats weaving between my legs, I tripped over the flip flop on my insensate foot.

(Why was I wearing flip flops in the apartment? Because I had put them on earlier when I went out to grab a loaf of bread from the market across the street, and kicking them off when I came back inside would have taken a millisecond or two – precious milliseconds that I chose to devote to blogging instead.)

I tripped, my foot contorted into an unnatural angle, and I landed on it hard, with a crunch that detonated an explosion of pain and expletives.

I knew immediately that something either bad or Very Bad had happened. Eighteen hours later, after a little ibuprofen and a lot of ice, I still don’t know which it is. I can walk (kind of), but there’ll be no 8 miles at marathon pace for me today. Or tomorrow. The optimist inside me is holding out some hope for Sunday’s scheduled 16-miler, but the cagey economist inside me isn’t placing any bets.

So there you have it. Once again, blogging and birds prove to be my running downfalls. Booze, I should clarify, was not a factor – though I freely admit that after the damage was done, I hit the rosé pretty hard.