Wednesday, August 15, 2012

My Aching Foot

The good news:  my foot is not broken.  The bad news:  it is bruised and I need to give serious consideration to not running.

Yesterday I visited a foot doctor who is a good friend who did an exam and took a number of X-rays and showed them to me.  There are no obvious breaks but I'm sure the pain is real.  The thinking is that years and years of supination has put me on a path towards a nasty fracture (quite possibly the eventual result could be the infamous Jones fracture).

There was no particular incident.  All of a sudden, not even after running, I had a lot of pain.  In the fall of 2008 I had a similar thing happen (though at that time the pain started right after a run).  Back then the pain was never as bad as it is now and I never consulted a doctor.  Nor do I think I stopped running.  After about 18 months I was pain free.

I think the sane thing to do is to quite running and get more serious about biking.  Right now, running is out of the question.  I'm not even going to try and bike for a few more days to give the foot some more rest time.

The thought of not running makes me sad.  I started running when during cross country season in 1972 when I was a junior in high school.  That's almost 40 years.  Ever since then I've run most days and on the days that I didn't run I usually felt guilty about not running.

:-(

2 comments:

Sub 5 at 50 miler said...

There must be a way to keep running. If you quit, I might at least retire from racing. Knowing that "Dr. K" is on the track running every week is inspiring to me (or at least makes me feel not quite so silly going out and running hard at my age). Tell your doctor you MUST run. Once, my finger was hurting from playing guitar, and the doctor asked if I could quit playing guitar. I said "no." So, it is acceptable to take a short break, then get some shoes to stop the supination, and keep running and blogging!

Sub 5 at 50 miler said...

I need to emphasize that you should find a way to keep running. Even if you bike to stay in shape for running, that would be ok. A guy on my masters cross country team a few years ago (well, more than 10 years) when I ran for Bill McMullen's old man's team ONLY biked for training, but then was able to beat me in a cross country race.