Since the pain in my lower right leg intensified four weeks ago I have been on a roller-coaster that simulates the mountains that I long to run pain-free. In a craze to diagnosis, treat and prevent further occurrence I failed to perform the thorough job of self-reflecting. Yes, I conceded stupidity for a number of bad choices but I misfired when I left it at that, further frustration forthcoming when I failed to flip back through the pages of my precise mileage accounts and detailed training logs. Having finally progressed past denial, anger and depression but not arriving at what I would term the upward turn, I was lingering in limbo.
Last night I ran, third time since that painful 5k after Holiday Lake a few weeks back. The leg was feeling fine walking, just the occasionally twinge of weakness and resulting worry, so I was hopeful that a run of true comfort and ease might follow. We arrived early enough to get a warm-up in, I did two loops of the parking lot but in the first few steps I felt the weakness. Hard to describe and even harder to stomach, the stiff ache in that lower leg beckoned for more of my attention. I went to the van and resumed my current addiction to googling all things calf and injury and waited for the rest of the group to arrive.
A poor choice of running shoes coupled with the slushy leftovers of a diminutive snow day and I was instantly urged by my body to heed the advice I'd promised to follow. Dropping pace and slipping to the back of the group my leg commenced tightening. Being alone in the woods and fighting the frequent slip on slush and sludge I focused on the tightening. A mile in I yearned to catch up to the group, I had them in my sights, but the faster I moved the more the leg tightened, not cramping, just tightening. Again, I dropped my pace, decided I could call it quits at any time having faith in my ability to find my way back to the car and settled into the run that was to be.
The group, or at least a portion of them, waited for me at an intersection. Todd inquired about my leg which was at it's tightest but I decided to carry on seeing as the group had waited for me. Fortunately, being among the group afforded conversation and a shift of focus from the leg. Oddly enough over the next mile or so the muscles began to loosen up. The more I ran the more I felt I could run. This is exactly what happened during this past Saturday's run in the mountains. I would imagine if it were a stress fracture this would not be the case.
With the leg warmed up and the pain lessening I strove to continue to take it easy. I realized, over the next few miles, how hard this is for me. I wanted so badly over the later part of the run at several points to speed up, it was an effort not to do so, that is just how deep the crazy runs within. In a way I was happy to see that a few weeks rest and recovery had not lessened the crazy (sometimes it's best to embrace what you are). Suffice it to say it was a struggle to constantly remind myself to keep my hands on the reigns, but the urge was overwhelming at times, I want so badly to be fast. Kevin Correll reminded me in the parking lot after the evening's run that just last week I was just happy to be out there. In other words, don't try and screw it up.
Long is the list of reasons why I love to run with others, but it's this source of outward reflection that I take with me, the insight and advice from fellow runners, that is perhaps the most beneficial. During the course of the run Grattan Garbee remarked that I was learning something, he wasn't sure what, but if I didn't learn it, really learn from it, I would be bound to repeat it.
Home from the evening's run, feeling better than I did at the start, I sat myself back down with my favorite book on running, Tom Noakes "The Lore of Running" (4th ed. 2003) and began to more thoroughly than ever read the chapter on 'Staying Injury Free'. Noakes insists several key points, his "Laws" of running injuries, including that they are not acts of God, seldom need surgery and cannot be cured until the causative factors are eliminated. He goes on to clearly spell out the treatments for most running injuries for which he claims to have a success rate of nearly 75% with injured runners in a 1983 study, and most of the runners who weren't successful, he claims, didn't follow the protocol correctly (Noakes, p 753).
Moving on from the laws, he lays out treatment, step two after determining that the injury is running related is 'Diagnose and determine the cause'. First, Noakes says, look at your shoes, have you switched them recently, are they worn out, etc. He is very thorough in his explanation for why you must look very closely at your shoes and how they can cause breakdowns throughout the body from the feet upwards. Then, Noakes says, if you are done looking at your shoes, look at your training to see whether your methods or patterns have changed that might explain the injury, including speed, daily and weekly running distance and number of days per week run (Noakes, p 772).
I stopped right there. I laid the book down, went and collected my training logs from this year and last and sat down with a calculator and a blank piece of paper. I had a good guess that I had increased my mileage in January but I hadn't really sat down and crunched the numbers.
What followed was an inquiry that lead to such an eye opening reveal I just had to share.
Turns out there is an awful lot you can learn from yourself if you keep a log, journal or both and actually go back and read and analyze the data. I had in fact increased my mileage too quickly in January. After a few minutes to figure out with Todd's help the formula to figuring out such increases and percentages I learned that over a five week period I made an increase of over 150%. Talk about stupid.
You see I ran Hellgate. Then I got sick.So I took a few easy weeks. Then I remembered I was training for Holiday Lake, looking towards Western States and now potentially had a sponsor. My intense desire to be good led to a very bad move in my training. In that five week period I jumped 18.5 %, 27%, 29%, 26%, and 1.5%. However, I never got my mileage up as high as I thought I had, my highest Monday to Sunday week was only 68 miles. But when you rearrange those weeks, look at them from say one particular Friday to the next, I had an 81 mile week, my highest ever.
But it wasn't this fact that was the eye opener. It was that on this same list of weekly miles I decided to record, due to Noakes suggestion, the number of days in a week run. In that same five week period I jumped from running three days to six days a week. And in the two weeks that followed the huge percentage increase I stayed at six days per week. The second six day week was when in fact my leg first began to hurt.
I almost never run six days. So I looked back further into the training logs into last year to see number of days per week run. And I learned two more things. First, through all of November and December I ran only 1, 2 or 3 days a week. Seriously, in those two months the most I ran was three days in any given week. Prior to January 6th the last time I had run four days in a week was the week ending October 28th. And from January 6th to January 27th I had jumped to six days. For someone who doesn't feel stupid, I certainly act so.
The second thing I learned was that I had actually run two six day weeks in October training for Masochist. The last day of the second six day week? I got INJURED!!!!! I did something to my left foot, my big toe tendon. An injury that scared the dickens out of me for Masochist, resulted in many trips to my chiropractor, numerous hours of icing, many usages of KT tape, hours rolling out with a tennis ball, took a combined two months to heal while all the while only running 1, 2, or 3 days a week!! When I realized this I didn't know whether to laugh, cry, or scream. If you don't learn you're bound to repeat your mistakes.
Thank goodness I'm too busy doing nothing on Friday's other than the occasional visit to the Aid Station or else it may have been worse, I may have pushed one of these weeks to seven days.
I was blind to this fact, hadn't seen the pattern until last night. Here I was running six days a week and instead of getting better I was having to take weeks and months of less days and mileage, in other words more was actually resulting in less and I was doing loads of backwards peddling. Not that I will never be able to run six days a week. But I can't get there in a few short weeks.
But wait, then there was more. I've done enough googling in these past few weeks that I have a much wider range of knowledge about my lower leg than ever before and yet I still don't know what is wrong with my leg. So I put down the log with all the numbers and I picked up the journal and started to reread my post training notes, the stuff that may not be blog worthy or seem of use to additionally note but still I record for posterity's sake.
And guess what I 'remembered'? After I finally overcame my foot/tendon injury in December, what did I go out and do? I went out and ran my fastest half marathon ever. Not a race, just a tempo run with Todd and Grattan in the snow, but still my fastest by several minutes at the distance. Immediately following the run I had sore, tight calf muscles. The next morning they were incredibly sore waking up, I wanted to cancel my run with Cheyenne and Jennifer but Todd urged me to go. My incredibly tight and painful calves hurt the entire run, I even made those girls walk for me once or twice. I took the next day off because they were that tight and painful. On New Year's Day I suffered through a long, cold run on Terrapin where they never eased up. Finally, after five days, they let up a little. So of course I went out to run a fast 10k that Saturday.
You're calves were bothering you at the beginning of January but you thought nothing of this when they started bothering you at the end of January? I had been running hills a lot the week this new pain emerged, I thought that was the cause. Well, what if the calf damage had started in early January and I just exasperated it with hills and more hills and little recovery by way of six day weeks until it finally said 'enough'?
So I kept reading.
I went far enough back to be reminded of something else by way of notes made about races. The Trail Nut Half Marathon, Carvin's Cove Marathon, the Lynchburg Half Marathon, and Deep Hollow Half Marathon all shared a similar ending in their race reports. At every one of these events I finished with debilitating calf cramps, at Deep Hollow they didn't even go away until a few minutes after the race ended. I have failed to narrow down the cause for the cramps other than possible hydration issues and pushing too hard at the end of races. However, it seems important now that I am seeing all of these other interconnected warning signs about calf pain and too much running with inadequate recovery.
Monday I went to Salem to see Josh Gilbert, chiropractor and race director, for his advice and aid for the pain in my leg. In addition to an adjustment he suggested I use the stick and roll out more frequently, say 100 times in a certain spot. Holding his advice in high esteem and suffering from soreness now in my left leg after Saturday's run in the mountains I spent Tuesday rolling out the legs like it was my part-time job. Several times that day I sat down to roll out the legs, both of them, using my stick, my foam roller and a softball. Yesterday morning the legs felt better, the soreness in my left leg was completely gone upon walking. Yet, I rolled again several times throughout the day. Even though the muscles didn't feel sore to the touch they reacted to the stick. My right leg (the injured one) felt pretty good, almost about as good as the left except in two spots.
The morning of the Liberty Mountain 5k I came home and Todd massaged my legs using the stick and his hands. There were several very painful, tender spots, but they weren't where the focal point of the pain was. They were really only painful when he tried to roll them. Now, nearly four weeks later, the leg is feeling better and better but last night those painful, knotty spots were still present upon using the stick and rolling.
After rolling out I went back to reading Noakes book, this time the chapter had lead into description and specific treatment for injuries. After reading about shin splints and stress fractures we arrived at Chronic Muscle Tears (muscle knots). They are possibly the 'third most common' running injury and 'usually misdiagnosed' can be very debilitating (Noakes, p. 820). The description seems similar to what I've been experiencing. Gradual onset, pain grew worse until it interfered with training, especially speed. According to Noakes there is only one possible treatment, cross-friction. Once last night with Todd's help and then again this morning I am working out the 'knots' with the help of a technique I read about online.
There is certainly more to the leg injury, or at least there was, but I have started to feel better, just maybe not as quickly as I would have liked. There was more to the pain when it began but I'm beginning to believe that what occurred the morning of that 5k was a direct result of my ignorant training, in particular the too quick increase in number of days a week and ignoring the warning signs that my calves needed special attention and care especially when the week the injury appeared I ran six days that included three days of fast, speed workouts on hills. My calves were begging for a break, maybe they decided to incorporate other muscles, tendons and ligaments to help spread their message to me as they alone were unable to reach me.
With a clearer view of how I may have gone wrong I can hopefully go forward better equipped at keeping injury at bay. Still in recovery I am desperately worried about taking any steps backwards at this point, but feel the need to get out and run to maintain some mental strength and physical conditioning. It's a hopeful sign to me that my leg felt no worse at all after yesterday's run and this morning it feels better yet, not strong or tight upon waking which may be due to the rolling I did before bed. I know that the legs seem to do better after they are sufficiently warmed up, which seems to take several miles and they are still in no mood to toy with speed. They still give me that feeling of weakness every so often when I'm walking around the house, but definitely less and less so.
I know one thing, I can almost dance pain free in my kitchen, and that my friends, I'm hoping is a very good sign.
-Alexis
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