Fall Down Go Boom

It's late April for the love of Pete. We shouldn't have to still be worried about this crap. But because of all the snow we got last weekend, I slipped and went down hard on a run early Wednesday morning. I ran another 4 miles like this:

My right knee when I got home. My left knee was a little scrapped up too.


Knuckles on my right hand. I went down so quick that I didn't even have time
to open my hands as I was carrying my mittens, so I landed on my knuckles.


Once I got my knee all cleaned up.

It happened here:

Coming down the "ramp" from the Franklin Ave Bridge on the west side of the
Mississippi, then getting ready to run on the trail south along the river.

BUT IT DIDN'T LOOK ALL SUNNY AND GREEN LIKE IN THAT GOOGLE MAPS IMAGE ABOVE. It looked more like this:

The trail along the river was in GREAT shape, but no one cleared the trail DOWN to the river.


So I ran down the road to the river. Notice the sharp little jaunt around the unplowed
pedestrian crossing "triangle." That circle is where my legs slid out to the left.


The arrow shows where I fell, running about 6:00 pace. I literally SHOT back up and kept going.
No pausing my Garmin here - it registered me slowing to 8:00 pace and then speeding back up.

I figured right away that I was fine. I hit the ground HARD, but I wasn't in horrible pain. In fact, after about another mile towards home, I forgot that I had fallen. It wasn't until I got in the house and tried taking off my pants that I went YE-OUCH and remembered I'd wiped out. (Yes, those scrapes on my knee were THROUGH decently thick running pants... that now have a 50 cent piece sized hole in them.)

I wrapped up my knee and went about my day. A few hours later at the gym, I stretched my legs out a bit:

There you can see the smaller scrapes on my left knee.
And I chose the red mat kinda for the same reason Deadpool has a red suit.

Later that day, my knees just ACHED from the fall. The scrapes were OK, but it was more of the impact of the fall that hurt. The next day, I had some bruising on both knees: my more-cut-up right knee had a faint cell phone sized bruise below the knee. And my less-cut-up left knee had a smaller (but more visible) bruise below the scrapes:

This was actually 48+ hours post-fall. The worst bruise on the less scraped knee.

Both knees still ache quite a bit, but I'm confident I didn't "hurt" anything. I can't kneel down without wincing. The next few days are supposed to say above freezing, so hopefully the risk of falling on ice will be a LOT lower...