No recap this week because there’s nothing to summarize. I wound up running just one day, Wednesday, and that was four miles. It actually went pretty well, but the next day I felt worse, so that was that for the week.
When I stopped running last Saturday, it was because I had no energy, my stomach was all messed up, my right achilles hurt, and I was having significant problems with my left shin. In other words, I was a wreck. As I figured would happen, my stomach and energy problems corrected themselves quickly. To my surprise, however, my achilles got better fairly fast as well, leaving only my shin as a problem. The shin was particularly concerning because it was in the same area as the stress fracture I had last fall and I had a lot of point tenderness in the same exact spot that was fractured.
I began to treat my shin very aggressively, throwing everything at it I could from e-stim to ultrasound to stretching to massage to strengthening exercises. To my surprise, after a few days, it got to the point where there was no pain to the touch whatsoever and everything seemed ok. However, in the process of fixing it, I think I strained my soleus muscle, possibly from some of the strengthening exercises I was doing or perhaps from overstretching. Regardless, I now have pain in my outer calf that pretty much prevents me from running.
I’ve cut out the exercises I was doing that stress that area of my calf and lightened up on the stretching as well. I’m hoping that will correct the issue as quickly as it popped up. If so, I should be able to resume running this week and hopefully will feel a lot better now that I seem to have resolved some of my achilles and shin pain. Regardless, I’m going to proceed much more cautiously than I did over the past few weeks. I was so focused on my foot that I forgot about everything else and figured that as long as my foot was holding up I could keep doing whatever I wanted. Now it looks like my foot was more ready to go than the rest of my body. I’m discouraged and frustrated but I’m not going to let it get to me. As the Alice In Chains song goes, “Just another lesson learned.”
I want to conclude with a shout out to Andrew Parkins. More years ago than I care to admit, I traveled down to the Charlottesville area for the Pepsi 10k, and much to my surprise set a 10k PR at the time. Mr. Parkins hit the same race this past weekend and also came away with a new PR, running a solid 33:49 for second place. Nice work, and as I’ve told him many times, he’s still just scratching the surface of what he’s capable of!
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