Mysterious Left Foot Pain!

Last Friday, I had a normal speed workout: it was my 2nd round of 2x2 mile intervals during this TC 10 Mile training session (with my 1st round being three weeks prior). Then Henry and I walked around the State Fair a bit (not too much). Then a lazy few hours at home followed by a quick trip to Henry's school for some beginning-of-the-semester conferences. My left foot started to ache a little while we were walking around his school after conferences.

So when we got back home, I took off my shoes and used a golf ball on the floor to help "roll out" the bottom of my foot.

But it did NOTHING. Surprisingly.

It was achy and sore all evening. We walked around the State Fair a bit that evening, and I thought it helped a bit, so that was promising:

Sweet Martha's Cookies... our FIRST time having them!

It felt better once I woke up on Saturday, but then started to hurt quickly after moving around. And it didn't like it when I clipped in or clipped out while on a bike ride. I was getting worried by that evening. I took some ibuprofen and a sleeping pill at bedtime Saturday night.

By Sunday, I was sure my running and biking were over for a few months. It just hurt so bad. I went for an easy walk mid-afternoon and was limping and had to slow-up 0.6 miles into it. I was bummed. I was coming to terms with not running the TC 10 Mile, and trying to figure out if I'd have issues with a walking boot on an upcoming family trip. I was wondering the best time to go in to get an x-ray as I was 100% sure I broke something in my foot. It just HAD to be broken.

Sunday was my first day under 10,000 steps since early April 2023. I broke my 1,252 day streak that day (3 years, 5 months, 3 days of 10K+):

Last 4 weeks, with the blue line being Sunday.
(More on my streak in this post from 2 years ago.)

Because I've had nerve pain issues in the past (my 2019 "injury" that kept me from running from August until March 2020... the ONLY good thing about March of 2020 was that I was starting to run again!), I knew I needed to truly test it. Afterall, if it was a stress fracture or something that was going to keep me off my feet for weeks-to-months to heal, how much worse could I make it over 1 run? So I got up Monday morning to try a shorter version of my normal Monday long runs. I was almost insulted when I woke up and saw my Garmin telling me I was ready to train hard:

Shove it.

I took off on my run and nearly stopped after 3 blocks. The pain was getting worse. "No, I need to TEST it." So I kept going. I nearly turned back for home after a half mile, but I thought I'd try getting down to the river... "Let's see how it acts going DOWN and UP a hill." So I did a weird loop down by the river that included that nasty steep hill at the 5 mile marker of the TC 10 Mile.

... and it wasn't feeling horrible. I was 2 miles into this run and thought I'd try running the next 4 miles hard. (A "normal" long run for me is 2.5 mile warm-up, 6 miles hard, and another few miles as cool-down to hit around 11.5 miles, so this was a shorter version.) And it didn't feel bad running fast. In fact, by the end of 4 harder miles, I hardly noticed the pain! And in my cooldown, it felt 100% A-OK! It wasn't until I finished running and took my first WALKING step that the pain came back. And it was back instantly, but it wasn't horrible.

Notice half-mile splits 1-4 looping around. Then going hard from split 4-12.
TC 10 Mile hill at mile 5 is right behind the word "University."

My 4 harder miles were decent: I had half mile splits of 3:00, 2:58, 2:59, 3:02, 3:03, 3:00, 2:56, 2:56 = 23:58 (5:59.50 / mile pace).

As I just "lived my life" on Monday after that run, the pain started moving around a bit. I took that as a good sign! If something was broke, it wouldn't move around, right? And it sure wouldn't feel better when RUNNING! It went from more of a pain on the inside of my arch to a pain more around to the top-inside of my foot:

Was lower on Friday and Saturday. Was more on top of my foot Monday.

I didn't do my heel exercises as it would stress out that pain a little, but otherwise it was a normal Monday... well, usually I have around 25K+ steps on Mondays because of a my long run, but this Monday was more like 18K because of a shorter long run and some final semester prep, but my foot felt WAY better than the day before when I barely got in 9K steps!

Tuesday I was on my feet a lot for my first day of the fall semester, and turned in a pretty average 16K+ steps (normal for a non-running day) with no big issues!

And I woke up yesterday (Wednesday) and went for a 6 mile run AND FELT NO ISSUES!! It's not 100% gone, but it's now feeling about 95% better, and I think that's due to pushing it hard on Monday and "resetting" it!

So for the time being, the TC 10 Mile is ON, and so might be a triathlon this weekend... more on that shortly (after some "Friday Funnies" tomorrow!).