100k Follow-up and a fight with Tendinopathy

[TL;DR version: I did it, I hurt myself, but I'm fine.]


Today is the summer solstice, yay!  Or, "June" solstice for those of you not in the Northern Hemisphere.  That gets capitalized, right?  Anyway, I've talked about my mixed feelings about the first day of summer before... A holy-crap-long-time-ago, actually.  They're still basically the same, just less Emo.

Being the summer solstice, it's also nearly my birthday!  Which also means that it's been almost a month since I said I was going to try to up my running game a bit and set a goal of running 100 km in 30 days.



I'm pleased to say that I met and even exceeded that goal by just a little bit, and that I even worked through my first real running-related injury doing it!  After a long-ish run on June 7th I developed some pretty good pain in my left Achilles area and I immediately started nervously Googling for a diagnosis and treatment ideas.  (What, you think I'm actually going to go to a doctor?!  Bah!)

Apparently Achilles tendinitis isn't a real thing, because the tendon itself is incapable of swelling.  It's actually tendinopathy, because the tendon is actually frayed slightly.  That made my stomach do a back flip.  I wasn't only afraid that I would need a surgery that I couldn't afford, but that I wouldn't be able to keep running and meet my 100 km goal!

Luckily, what I had (have?) was/is pretty mild, and there have been some pretty good studies on non-surgical, strength based treatments for Achilles tendinopathy, including those mentioned in this long, un-dated, poorly titled, but otherwise very good article.  I have stuck pretty closely to that program for the past week and can happily report that I ran over 20 miles this week with only minimal discomfort.  I'm obviously going to keep up the calf strengthening work for at least another couple of weeks and see how the pain is, because honestly, your calves can never be too strong.

Ever had anything come between you and your goals?  Maybe just a running injury story you want to share?  Let me know!

Also, if you're interested in running (and not just racing), I highly recommend checking out Jason Fitzgerald's Strength Running website.  Run happy!

Luck o' The Irish

Another week, another injury. Although this one happened at an event where there was swing dancing and swing dancers were present, I'm not going to call this one a Swing-jury because I didn't do it while actually dancing.
Looks pretty good, eh? The first picture is from about an hour after the incident, right after I cleaned it up pretty good in the bathroom sink at the restaurant where we ate dinner. It doesn't look too bad and you can barely see any of the secondary cuts, only the deep on stands out. The second picture is after I got home from the urgent care clinic a few hours later. It looks a lot worse because of the dried blood and and the skin starting to dry out a bit. It probably didn't help that we waited to watch the end of the North Carolina basketball game to go get it stitched up.

How it happened makes me feel pretty stupid, although I was not drunk, so that's good at least. After serving beer all afternoon for the Fort Collins Downtown Business Authority's Saint Patrick's Day live music and beer garden hootenanny, I was simply cutting a plastic zip-tie off of a metal pole to help clean up after the festivities and forgot to cut away from myself instead of towards myself, and the knife slipped, and cut across three of my fingers, coming within 1mm of the flexural tendon of my ring finger with that deep cut there.

Could have been a lot worse. The stitches come out next Monday.