Adventures of a frustrated athlete, episode ?

Yesterday's episode of "adventures of a frustrated athlete" ended with a broken spoke 6.5 miles into my ride. The only brightside to this episode was that it happened 3 blocks from home, instead of 8 miles from home like the broken chain episode. I was riding a loop that is just under 7 miles long, with the intention of repeating it 2 or 3 times, depending on how my back felt. But, as I was flying down the hill into town at the end of the first loop, my bike suddenly started making this horrible clanking noise. I pulled over to find out what was wrong and had trouble locating the problem...until I realized one of my spokes was sticking out. A kind gentleman on his way to lunch tried to help me rig it so I could at least get the wheel to spin quietly on the way home. He said you can often just pop out the other end of the spoke, but on my bike apparently they are not made to do that. So we managed to twist the broken end around another spoke and I was able to drag the bike home. I was only a block away from the bike shop, but of course it was the one day of the week that the shop is closed...

I really wanted some exercise yesterday, and 6 miles on a bike was nowhere near enough. So I had to drag myself to the gym and torture myself on the elliptical for 35 minutes. At least I had some good music to listen to, and a good book to read, while I was enduring the torture. 

Between my foot pain, back pain, and broken bikes, I am getting very frustrated! The back pain got so bad last week, it was shooting down into my leg and making my leg go numb. That resulted in me being unable to ride much more than 10 miles at a time, which was realy frustrating after all my 30-50 mile rides. One of my DO (osteopathic doctor) friends fixed my back for me Sunday night, which helped a lot, but I know it is not going to stay fixed for long. Too much bad muscle memory. I had made it 18 miles with no significant pain on Monday, and was hoping for some decent mileage yesterday as well. 

I head to RI tomorrow, and I'm not bringing the bike with me. I'm planning to try running on grass to see if that hurts my foot or not, since it's softer than pavement. If that fails, I guess I will be stuck exercising indoors on torture machines for the week. When I get back to WV, I will have to make a decision about whether I am going to get my foot injected, or whether I am going to try to find a sports medicine specializing foot doctor who might be able to tell me what is actually wrong with my foot...