Two week before my very first marathon I stepped on a fire hose at work and rolled my right foot. It hurt so bad I could barely drive back to the station. The entire bottom half of my foot eventually bruised and after this injury I seem much more prone to having similar problems with that foot.
A week before my second marathon the running gremlins reached up and grabbed me again - I rolled the same foot on a round rock at mile post 2.25 at Forest Park. Again, I ran a marathon with a black and blue foot. Imagine the odds! But things were different last year for my most recent marathon attempt--my feet were good, but I ran with a strained lower back. Craziness!
But I'm not just hurt at race time. Oh no, I've had some training related injuries too. My first was a bout with ITBS. I found out quickly enough what it was (from a booth at a race expo!) and within a month it was gone. To deal with it I added some new stretches to my routine, including a pendulum clock looking thing and another I affectionately call the ballerina pose; one arm arched over my head like I'm in Swan Lake or something. But what really cured my sore knee was massaging the outside of my thigh with a foam roller.
At first I could barely put any weight at all on the blue roller--now I could use more. It really takes out the knots and kinks in my overused leg muscles. It's kept handy, hidden behind an overstuffed chair in my living room, and I break it out several times a week when watching TV in the evening. I love my little foam roller. We also have a big red body ball that we keep downstairs which gets a little use from me now then for some core.
I trained pretty hard for last years marathon, doing over 50 miles a week for a stretch. When the race and the race soreness wore off I was left with left heel pain. Yep, plantar fasciitis. I went to a so called "sports doctor" to get that fine diagnosis (I had a pretty good idea already). It was important to me to find someone who understood runners, and not just their particular problems, but someone who understood what makes us tick. Someone who could relate. I pictured someone who would be a fellow runner.
The guy I went to was none of that. His two pieces of advice; go get fitted for orthotics and (cue the big fanfare trumpet music here)-- think about giving up running. "Hmmm, yeah, I'll do that when you think about giving up portraying yourself as a sports doc!" Bite me.
I went to his recommended orthotics guy. He told me he'd love to make me a $500 pair of custom inserts but almost everybody does just fine with the off the shelf type. "Hmmmmm, you mean I didn't need to go through all this rigmarole and could have just bought some damn slip-ins at the store?" "Yep" says the orthotics dude. I drove down to Roadrunner Sports and bought a pair of green Superfeet for $30. They work great.
I'm also more diligent about replacing my shoes more often. This a pretty cheap sport so it doesn't make sense to scrimp on shoes. 500 miles now, and that's it, new shoes.
I also got a night splint for treating the PF, but I'm not convinced it does much. So far, and knock on wood here, despite getting my miles back up the plantar is doing fine and I would even say is better than it was before I started really running again at the first of the year. Go figure. I also self massage my plantar trigger points every day. Trouble is I don't have a clue about where those trigger points might be, so I just massage the entire bottom of my foot.
And speaking of horses (well I did just mention "Trigger") the last thing I do to stay injury free is take those huge horse pills we all love, the twins of gag reflex; that's right the urp duo: Chondroitin and Glucosamine. You best get yourself a big sip of water before trying to choke down those two sons-a-bitches. But most people say they help, or are at least harmless, so I take them.
So I'm doing okay, as long as I keep stretching and doing the what I'm doing. Oh, I did roll that same damn right foot again at work last week and haven't run since then while I wait for the purple to fade to green and then back to...skin color. Not much I can do about that one. Stupid foot. But running is a competitive sport. And I know who I'm racing against.
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