Tag: plantar fasciitis

Can I Return These?

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I tore my sole up in January.  I struggled with plantar fasciitis through spring.  I battled back against my withered fitness during the summer.  Now the fall is here, the runner’s Mecca, and by all accounts I should be back up to speed and racking up the miles and pushing up my distance and reveling in the gorgeous weather that will last a scant month or so.

But my feet are borked again.  I felt a tweak this weekend when I got in some runs in Florida, so for that reason and that reason alone (not at all because the kids were away and I was able to get some entirely uninterrupted and unmolested sleep, nope, not even a little bit because of that) I took several days off.  Yesterday evening it became impossible to put it off any further and I went for a run with the dog, and now it’s official.  They’re borked.  Both feet, no less.  I’ve got pain in my right heel not unlike the precursors to the plantar fasciitis I feel I’m finally recovering from in my left.  My left foot feels like I stepped on a sharp rock, and while my foot was tweaked upward, I hit it with a hammer.

First-world problems, I know. Boo hoo, I can’t run without this nagging pain in my feet.  Problem is, if I can’t run, I’m not going to want to do any exercise, because other exercise is only going to make me mad that I’m not running.  And if I’m not running or exercising, I’m going to start feeling sluggish.  And when I start feeling sluggish, I’m not going to be thinking as clearly for my writing nor motivated to eat any better, and it’s all going to turn into one towering nosedive that ends with my health in the crapper and my mood shattered on the rocks.

The most frustrating thing is, I don’t know what to attribute the injuries to.  On one hand I think it may be all my recent runs in my VFFs, but then I wonder why my left foot improved for so long doing almost all of my runs in them.  On the other hand, I wonder if it’s perhaps the shoes I’m wearing while I’m at school and on my feet for better than half of my workday.  On the third hand, maybe I’m just getting old and my feet are broken.

Seriously.  I’m not yet 35, is it time for parts of my body to start simply breaking down?  I know it’s a reality I’ll have to face sooner or later, but it just doesn’t seem right.  Do they have some sort of guy-in-his-thirties warranty or trade-in program?  Because I’m pretty sure the feet I have are defective.

Finally Truly Back From Injury (I Hope)

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My first year of running saw me rack up about 500 miles in just over 8 months.  My second year saw me come this close to 1000.  I enjoyed a meteoric rise in my ability to cover distance and run at speed and naturally it left me feeling like I could accomplish just about anything.

So when I suffered a pair of crippling injuries at the beginning of this year, it was humbling.  I went from running 25 miles a week or so to being sidelined for three and four weeks at a time.  I went from a long weekend run of 10 or 12 miles on average to barely finishing a 5k.  For a guy like me who thought he was bulletproof, the injuries and my inability to bounce back from them were a blow to both my health and my ego.

I’ve tried not to think too hard about it, not to dwell and fixate and obsess over how much speed I’ve lost, how much my fitness has declined and how frustrated I’ve been.  If you’re a habitual runner like me, I need say no more — you know the pain of not running.  If you’re not, I’d liken it to having the flu for weeks on end.  You feel weary, you feel caged in, like you’re just a drain on yourself and the people around you, like you’re asleep on your feet.

But then, a few weeks ago, a turn.

I’d been intentionally taking it easy; easier than easy, really, being careful not to push too hard and set myself back; for over a month, not running more than 5 miles outside of one 10k race (which did set me back).  Then I had one run of six miles with a friend from high school and suffered no ill effects.  Then the next week I ran five to be safe, and this past weekend I ran six again for good measure.

Well, what can I say?  My feet feel healthier than they have since before my injuries.  I’m not sure what the turnaround was, but I spent a few months after my podiatrist visit in a purgatory of not having serious pain but not feeling 100% healthy either.  Last few weeks, the injured foot feels about 95% most of the time.  It’s been a long road back, and I’ve been totally scattered: one moment I’m overly optimistic, lying to myself about my recovery to make it seem like it’s been better.  Next, I’m beating myself up for pushing too hard too fast and I’m skipping a run or cutting one short because I’m scared of injury.  Now, though, I can finally say that I’m getting back to normal.

Sidenote.

For some reason I’m feeling more keenly than ever how tedious it must feel to a non-runner to read a runner’s writing about running.  I mean, I hear the words flowing out of my fingertips (more or less) and all the athlo-babble about distance and biomechanics and injuries and pacing and negative splits and I almost want to punch myself in a mouth.  Damn.  How to approach this differently?

What’s a long run?  I guess a long run is a distance that’s significantly longer than your standard run.  Say 40% or more beyond your weekly runs.  It’s the equivalent of locking the doors and unplugging the phone and turning off the computer and cranking up your music or your white noise machine or your internal monologue.  If daily runs are your morning cup of joe, the long run is a series of espresso shots, dropping one just after the high of the first fades.  The long run is the me-time that you chase but can never catch during the week.  It’s the cherry on your sundae, the finish on your cigarette, the long dark tea-time of the soul.  And I’ve been without it for MONTHS.

Well, I’m getting it back and it’s glorious.  I feel more confident about my running than I’ve felt since the year ticked over.  I feel like I’ve been pretending about getting myself back in shape all this time and now I can embrace it for real.  I feel like I’ve got something to work toward vis-a-vis pushing my distance up again, rather than spinning my wheels in a weather-delayed holding pattern as I’ve done for months.

I picked out a route that I haven’t run since December because it’s just been too far and I couldn’t trust my feet.  I didn’t just run it; I attacked it, setting a pace I’ve not set in half a year and finished, sweating and breathing hard and lurching in exhaustion up the hill to the house (living at the top of a hill SUCKS at the end of every run).  I stretched and took stock and realized that I felt physically better than I have in months.  I waited for a few hours and re-evaluated that impression: I’ve been so mental over the injury that I can’t trust myself.  I think I feel better when I don’t.  I want to feel better but I can’t.  I feel like I can’t run that much but I can.  Hours later, the evaluation held up.  A switch has been flipped, and it feels like I’m back.

I’m burning to go for 7 this weekend but I’m going to do the “smart” thing and not jump too far too fast.  I’ll play it conservative and do 6 one more week and then I’ll go for 7.  I’ve no idea what pace I’m going to aim for or what’s even within reach, but I think the distance will be there.  I think I can finally count on my body to hold up over long distance again.  

It’d be time to start thinking about my next half marathon if we weren’t so broke.

Late Night Write

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Getting the writing done a little bit later than I’d rather.  But such is life.  I still have yet to miss a day or a deadline, and that’s something.  In fact, I sat down to write tonight at 9pm telling myself, “just get the 900 words and sack out,” and my ink-crazed id-writer half kept me going all the way to 1400 words, where my clearer-thinking half realized that if the rest of us didn’t get together and stop him soon, he might keep us up and writing all night, so we tagged him with the tranq gun (yeah, there’s a tranq gun in my head for when my other mes get out of hand, what do YOU use??) and he’s taking a little nappy-nap now.  And YES, it’s considered to be late at night at 10:30, I’m the parent of a toddler and THIS IS MY LIFE.

Spring Break is halfway over — actually more than halfway, now that today’s at an end — and that’s sad.

Two things from today.

First of all, I had my first post-podiatrist run on my not-actually-shattered foot, now infused with cortisone, AKA liquefied unicorn horn, AKA jumpin’ jamba juice, AKA I-don’t-know-what-pain-is-anymore happy medicine.  Seriously, in my first contiguous three-mile run in over a month, I felt not a tweak of pain or discomfort or “wrongness” in the heel, and nothing since.  Not only was there no pain, but I found myself running faster and easier than I have in months.  I kept going faster than I wanted to and reminding myself to slow down, which, for a runner, is sort of like asking your torturers to give you a few more lashes and really take their time with the thumbscrews.  The run over, I iced it and stretched the foot, per doctor’s orders, and for today at least, it’s holding up fine.

What’s not holding up fine, on the other hand, are my lungs, for two reasons.  First, I’m out of shape.  Not running consistently since basically December has reduced my conditioning to (for me) pitiful levels, and I cut the run short today as much out of an inability to breathe enough as out of caution not to overwork the heel.  Second, spring seems to have sprung here in Georgia, and if you’ve ever been in Georgia in the merry merry months of springtime, you know that the trees are mating, and their yellow, uh, genetic legacy just lays like a blanket over EVERYTHING.  We had an honest-to-goodness deluge of rain at the beginning of the week, and in the two days since, the pollen has piled up enough that our blue car is now blue-under-a-fine-misting-of-vomit-yellow.  The breeze stirs and you see it swirling like a desert sandstorm.  The trees rustle and it comes cascading down like the yellow snowfall of your nightmares.  When it rains again, the rivers and streams will look like streams of snot.  So me, I go out for my first run in a week, and as much as it’s a nice day out, I’m breathing in these coarse particulates by the metric sharknado-ton.  Oh, but I’m not breathing so much as gasping for my life, so I don’t even have the benefit of the filtration system in the nose, no, it’s all going straight down the gullet and powdering the inside of my lungs.  I feel confident that if you could shine a blacklight into my trachea, my entire respiratory system would fluoresce with this gunk.

So I’m hacking up what looks like powdered yellow-cake uranium, but I had a good run, so that’s awesome.  And I got my writing done for today, and that’s awesome too.

I wish there was more cleverness to be had in this post, but the id-writer is snoring so hard over there with that dart in his neck that he woke the neighbor’s dog up.  Nothing but drool and night terrors for that guy.  What a mess.

Modern Medicine is Magic (a running post in which you can see the inside of my foot and it looks like a horror movie)

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So I’m a runner.

I caught this disease almost two years ago (no, it was earlier than that, but I date it from my first race which was on Cinco de Mayo, a “holiday” whose legitimacy it is not the goal of this blarg to explore) and have since embraced it, the way Rainman kinda leans into the skid and accepts that while he may never be a dashing, smooth-talking ladies man, hey, he can count the balls off some beans.

That is to say, running is not the best of hobbies to have.

Let me clarify that.  I call it a hobby because in a lot of ways it’s no longer about the exercise, it’s about the meditation, the focus it brings, and yeah, let’s be fair, it’s still in no small part about the exercise, but let’s push that aside for now, I’m going somewhere here.  Yes, hobby.  A hobby is something you enjoy doing, something that eats up a (often unhealthily [yes, unhealthily, shut up]) disproportionate amount of your time (money, thought, money, sense of a well-rounded life, money…), and as I’ve mentioned before, for a sport that professes to be about simplicity and an escape from big gyms and monthly fees and expensive equipment, you can drop a fargoing bundle on running gear. And it’s not the best of hobbies to have because it becomes difficult, when you have a (growing) family and a (beyond) full-time job and, let’s not forget, I also just took up capital-w Writing as another hobby (because I have time for that like I have hair on my head [spoiler alert: the key word is “shortage”]), to make time for Everything Which Must Be Accomplished Today.  Less so when you start out and it’s a twenty- to thirty-minute jaunt here and there, more so when you really lose your mind and begin running for nearly an hour at a time four or five times a week, and two hours on the weekend (because daddy needs his long run, no I don’t have a problem just GIVE ME THAT LONG RUN).

Anyway, there’s a problem with running and it’s this:

Dondraper it, let me try again.  There are some problems with running, and one of them is this:

Nope, still not there.

Running is a problem.

Here’s one reason.  We’re built to run, sure, great, fantastic.  The body and its legion of interconnected systems combine to make humans one of the kings of distance runners on our little blue slice of life.  However, most of us lazy Americans don’t give running a try until we’re old enough to know better.  Our lives of leisure and sedentary work and Law-and-Order marathons have caused those finely tuned systems to atrophy.  So we jump into running, and it hurts.  It fargoing HURTS.  Blisters, shin splints, sun burn, broken toenails, bloody nipples, ALL of these things can happen, sometimes within your first few steps out the door.  And a lot of people try it for a week and it hurts TOO DONDRAPER MUCH and they quit.  Hard to fault them.  Others think, “hey, this hurts, but it’s kind of awesome too,” and they keep at it.

Now, the body adapts fast.  It builds up resilience quickly.  And as any runner who makes it past, say , three months (I just made that figure up, but let’s go with it because this is my house) will tell you, once you get to the point where you can run a few miles, the rest is mental.  So if you didn’t drop out when it started hurting (which was immediately), you’re unlikely to drop out barring serious injury, and you’ll keep pushing up the mileage and the duration and you’ll find yourself smashing through your own boundaries and personal achievement and yay yay yay I’m awesome, running is awesome, the world is awesome, yay running.

Problem is, running is not like other sports.  You don’t take spikes to the knee making a tag at second, you don’t get a three-hundred pound linebacker smashing your brains into mush on every snap, you don’t take ice skates to the teeth when the puck does the thing with the hockey implements.  Okay, I don’t know a lot about hockey injuries, but I HAVE AN IMAGINATION AND ICE SKATES ARE DANGEROUS AND THOSE GUYS ARE BIG AND FAST.  Running injuries are subtle.  Like a fine wine (except that they crush your soul rather than bringing sweet, sweet music into it), running injuries develop over time.  Figure a conservative 1000 strides per mile times an average of 4 miles per run (my average in 2013)  times let’s just say I ran every other day last year and that’s a Holy Sharknado lot of steps you’ve taken, each one magnifying the entropy that your thirty-year old (indulge me) frame has slid into over the past YOUR WHOLE LIFE of not doing anything active outside of an occasional game of yard football.

So, my feet hurt.  And they finally hurt badly enough and longly enough (yep) for me to go see a doctor.

X-rays, poking and prodding, lots of questions.

Turns out that while I have no structural deficiencies (no broken bones or heel spurs or stress fractures or duck-feet), I do have a mild form of plantar fasciitis.  The phrase the doctor used was “you have a high arch, but your foot is behaving as if your arch is flat.”  I asked him what the haberdashery that meant, and he responded with words that may have been answers, but I still have no idea what he actually said.  Basically, I think what he said is that because I have healthy feet and because I have good running form, I’m overworking the plantar fascia (the tendons along the underside of the foot) and then they recede and shrink up like your business in a cold pool when I go to sleep at night, then they get extra stretched out again when I run again, wash, rinse, repeat.  (Healthy feet + good form, then, equals injury.  THIS IS RUNNING.)

The treatment?  Stretch it and ice it.  Seriously, that’s it.  He gave me a cortisone shot (I’ll come back to that) and some pills to take if I have more pain (the pills may cause a slight evacuation of my stomach contents, so, you know, USE SPARINGLY) and a see-you-in-a-month.

Two things bear mentioning from my little visit with my healthcare professional.

First, x-rays.

wpid-imag0945.jpgThose are goldfinger alien appendages.  Seriously.  From the above angle they look like the long, taloned claws of the grim-reaper dunked in phosphorescent goo (and, by the way, look at the big bone [the tarsal?  Go science yourself] just below the “toe joints” [yeah, SCIENCE] and tell me those don’t look like demonic slitted eyes gazing into your soul.  SERIOUSLY WHAT ARE THOSE).  And then…

wpid-imag0946.jpg

If you’ve seen the first thirty seconds of Terminator 2, I need say no more.  If not, what are you doing here?  Go watch it.  Anyway, that’s a fargoing cyborg death-claw-foot, not a human extremity.

Second, the shot.  We’ve all had them.  Shot in the arm; if the doctor likes you he’ll tell you an amusing anecdote about fly fishing or his fourth-grader’s art project and you’ll be so bored you won’t even notice the needle sliding in, and then it’s over.  Dentist shots aren’t so quick or painless but at least you can’t see it happening so there’s that.

A cortisone shot is different.  First of all, the needle is longer than anything piercing your skin has any right to be.  My stomach did a backflip as soon as he uncorked the thing and I was literally unable to look away from it; all I could think was how it could possibly penetrate my flesh that much without causing searing, blinding pain.  The doc assures me that he’ll freeze the skin and I won’t feel anything except a little pulling.  Okay, sure, but I still can’t take my eyes off the thing.  He sprays a stream of this liquid at my heel and it feels like I’ve dunked the thing in a supercooled ice bath; the needle goes in and sure enough, I feel nothing.  But I see it.  The needle goes in and in and in, like a snake down a drain.  (Real or plumber’s, you decide!)  Then it stops, and he begins to depress the plunger.

Emptying the syringe takes him at least a minute.  Part of it’s because he’s deliberately going slow, which he explains is to allow the medicine to empty into the tissue without displacing things too rapidly, which would cause serious pain and discomfort.  The other part is that, its, uh, payload is dramatically big.  Again, all I have for reference are those doctor’s office inoculations, so maybe my scale is broken like the pollen count mechanism here in Georgia… but I won’t get sidetracked on that (tonight!).  3 ccs, he says.  Anyway, he’s sitting there pushing this clear fluid into the side of my heel and my eyes are just frozen to it like a five year old’s tongue to a light pole in winter, and I keep saying “uh huh, right, sure” to whatever he says in his reassuring voice.  It goes on too long, and my skin looks like one of those closeups of water that you see where the surface isn’t broken, it’s lifting up and sticking to the sides of the straw or string or whatever’s stuck in it, and I’m thinking of all that fluid oozing into my heel and oh my god, where is all that stuff going, it’s not my bloodstream because that’s not the point, and I feel myself getting dizzy.

Lunch almost comes up, but just like that, it’s over, the swordfish spike comes out of my heel, and he’s wiping it off with alcohol.  “All done,” he says, and I ask the question I’ve been afraid to ask because I’m somehow certain the answer will be no: “can I keep running?”

He laughs a little.  “Oh, sure.  I mean, don’t go running six miles on it tonight or anything, but you can return to your regular activities in a day or two.  Just keep stretching and icing.  Now the nurse will come in for your ultrasound.”

Thank crikey.  Wait, what?

The nurse comes in with this wand which makes no sound, not least of all ultra (okay, I apologize to the readers for the horribleness of that joke, but no, I’m not taking it back).  She slathers it with goop and rubs it all over my heel and the back part of the bottom of my foot for a good five minutes, explaining that this will distribute the cortisone all throughout the soft tissues of my foot.  Small talk about our kids (being a parent somehow makes small talk in odd situations so much easier than it ever was in the years BS (before sprout).  Then she’s done, she packs it all up, and sends me on my way, telling me to be careful the rest of the day and not take part in any strenuous physical activity because my foot is going to feel a little numb.

That clear fluid from the syringe, the cortisone, is made of fairy tears or unicorn pee or something.  I put my heels to the ground and feel nothing but a dull tingling in my ENTIRE left foot, like I’d sat on it funny for an hour and it has that pins-and-needles thing going on.  This feeling lasted for the entire rest of the day.  No pain, just that bizarre, stars-exploding-in-my-nerve-endings kind of feeling every time I take a step.

I wake up this morning and the sharp pain I’m used to feeling in my heel on my first steps of the day is just gone.  I rouse the sprout (okay, he was already roused and chasing his toy dinosaurs around his room) and take him downstairs – the stairs that usually intensify the pain in the heel, and again – nothing.

I won’t be running on it again today, but hopefully before school’s back in, I can take it for a spin and see how it’s doing.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: modern medicine is magic.  I learned this firsthand when my son was born with half his insides on the outside, and I’ve learned it again since this doctor was able to pull the evil out of my heel like sucking up milk through a straw.