Wednesday I had a field day for work. I had to inspect a couple trails and rec sites and give my new staff member a tour. Normally if I was working solo I would just plan to run during my lunch or on one of the trails. But I couldnt really ditch the new guy for an hour! I was kinda bummed because I had taken Tuesday as a rest day and 2 rest days in a row is just blasphemy :) But I figured at least we would be outside and doing some walking/hiking and maybe we could finish early.
So we started our day and it was raining off and on. We walked a couple short trails and toured the sites we needed to. I packed all my own food and managed to avoid the lure of Tim Hortons advertising that their Nutella donuts are back...
I realized near the end of the day we were ahead of schedule. I figured once I got back to town I would have time to put in an hour long run. I was pumped! We had done a decent amount of walking throughout the day and there was no pain from my heel. So I whipped home, got my running gear on and set up my app to do an hour at 8:20 mins/mile or less. I headed out and made it maybe 100m and had this sharp shooting pain along the outside of my left foot. Right from below my ankle bone to about half way down my foot (across from my arch). This was not a maybe you need to loosen up type of pain, this was a stop right now something is wrong...
I was mad...my plans were foiled. I was so in the mood to run and I couldnt. I actually drove to the gym instead as I still had 45mins before I had to pick up the kids from daycare and I wanted to get some physical activity in. I worked on my upper body and core, but my heart just wasnt into it. I think I spent half the time texting people how distraught I was. By the time I got the kids and got home I was a disaster...I love running with a passion and when I cant do it I am miserable. My husband looked almost scared when I told him and was saying he was going to have to mentally prepare for the coming days of "Grumpy Jess"...lol.
I did a lot of googling on the pain I was having and the spot that hurt sounded like my peroneal tendon. Of course everything said to stay off of it and ice it...
It wasnt bothering me when I walked around so I decided to go to the grocery store to pick up a few things. Well I wore my flip-flops and I didnt realize till I got there that trying to walk in them made the pain so much worse! I was hobbling around the store and leaning on the cart just to get around! I got home and got set up in bed with an ice pack and took an anti-inflammatory.
I woke up this morning and it felt ok to walk on. But it hadnt bugged me to walk on the morning before either so I didnt know if that really meant anything. I told my running buddy that there was about a 90% chance I wouldnt be running today. That I would do a test jog at about 10am and if there was any pain I was cancelling our run. I continued to ice my foot off and on throughout the morning and took more ibuprofen. At 10 I went for a quick jog to see how it felt. I was a little aware of the spot that had hurt before but there was no shooting pain at all. You know there's that voice that tells you the smart thing to do is to just stay off it totally. Then there's than running addict devil on your other shoulder telling you, you've already taken two days off and you'll go real slow and you need your fix... well you can imagine who won that mental battle :)
So I told my running buddy we were on but I was going to go slow and I reserved the right to bail at any time. So we headed out and our route is 2.5miles out with rolling uphills and then turn around and come back down. On the flatter sections I felt good and there was no pain. On a couple of the steeper hill sections I could feel a bit of tenderness, no sharp pain but once again I was aware of that spot. Once we hit the flat top and turned around to head back down there was zero pain or tenderness at all for the whole run back. I was pretty happy!! Slow run...but I dont care, beats the scenarios I had playing out in my head!
I'm assuming the extra long run I did on Sunday with the 2400ft of ascent must have inflamed that tendon...that'll teach me! Too big of a jump in distance going from 24 to 30k. I'm feeling cautiously optimistic though and hoping that if I reduce my mileage and pace for the next week or so the tenderness will go away. For now I'm continuing with the RICE formula...although yes I suck at the "rest" part!!
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