2012-366 Day 87 – Injury

This just goes to show that I need to stop thinking about things, but I recently thought that I was lucky to have avoided any running injuries despite the fact that I’m a bit overweight. Anyone want to guess what happened about two weeks ago? Yup, that’s right, my left heel started hurting.

It was a little sporadic and I could run through it (it would settle down after a while, although I was changing my gait a bit which generally bodes poorly for not sustaining other injuries), but in training for Ragnar I couldn’t really afford to let it stop me. After a particularly bad day last week I finally decided to see what all the fuss was about. Naturally this didn’t involve seeing a doctor (I had enough of that in the Lost Year) but instead WebMD and Google. WebMD wasn’t much help in this case, as its main theory was a stress fracture, which I could not afford. Googling came back with a more likely suspect, plantar fasciitis, an ailment I was familiar with from my reading of Runner’s World. Since the main treatment for that was some taping and rest, I decided that was what I had.

After acquiring some tape and applying it to the bottom of my foot, I could tell we were in business. The pain started to fade almost immediately. I’m still working through it a bit, but I’m glad it wasn’t something major, particularly this close to Ragnar. I’m actually surprised I didn’t have an occurrence of this earlier, as it does tend to effect overweight runners.

So the moral of the story, I suppose, is if you self-diagnose yourself, only do it for minor things and don’t assume the worst. Yeah, we’ll go with that.

Weight: 232.2 Loss: 7.8 lbs – Running Yearly Mileage: 78.7 miles (+4 miles)
Fitocracy Level: 17 (30682 points, 332/4500 to next level) – ID: disciplev1
Soccer – Last Game: W, 10-4 (Record: 1-3) Next Game: 4/1 – 5 pm