61 days – Wow that was a quick 3 weeks!

OK, firstly training has not being going as well as I had hoped! Usual complaint of increasing the training load too quickly and suffering an overuse injury – this time a bruised heel.

Actually it’s not really bad and if I was honest I could probably run longer distances but I’ve heard that training on a heel injury can have a long lasting impact and in some cases take ‘years to heal’.

So I’ve decided to take it easy and throw everything at it to get it healed quickly: There’s been heat (heat pad), cold (ice pack), a combination of both (to encourage rapid blood flow), non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), some taping, massage, and then more massage with a borrowed novasonic device from College.

Not that I’ve been letting myself go, I’ve been rowing every day for the last 5 days and in total have rowed over 50K! I’ve also been out doing some easy jogging and today went down to the beach to try some barefoot running.

I had listened to an old podcast from Steve Chopper who had interviewed a guy who always ran barefoot because he, like me, was always getting injured. Now he doesn’t even have any trainers but just uses special rubber shoes called ‘Vibram five fingers‘ and he loves them.

I probably ran about 5k in total on the beach and was really leased with how it went. Apart from having sore soles due to grainy sand, the injured heel held up well with no pain – a good sign. I was deliberately running on the fronts of my feet and kept the stride length down as others had advised and even though the sand is tough to run on I really enjoyed it. I even ran the last 1k along the water’s edge in and out of the surf – bliss! I really am lucky to live so close to the beach.

So over the next week or so my main aim is to carry on building things up on sand in bare feet and see how it goes. Only when I am 100% satisfied that the heel is better will I start on the harder trails again. I’m not too worried as I’m keeping fit and building my strength and stamina up on the rower in the evenings.

I’ll report back in a week and let you know how it’s going. PS there’s a great video about heel pain I’ve just come across here http://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/foothealth/Pages/HeelPain.aspx