In fact, my foot has some angry little piggies on it.
My first piggie is the one that is angriest. It has taken over the littliest piggie's primary duty of going "wee wee wee" although it's doing it out of pain instead of going all the way home.
So what do I do even though this thing hasn't healed completely? Run three days in a row. I am a freaking genius.
- Run #1: Speed work on the treadmill. I actually had some semblance of sanity and didn't do the mile repeats that were on the schedule. Instead, I did 10 one-minute sprints with a 2 minute recovery. Foot was feeling good, looking good. Definitely not as angry.
- Run #2: 6 mile easy run. This run hurt the worst. It didn't really hurt, actually--I just felt a definite weirdness across the top of my foot in the 5th mile that translated itself into a wondrous day of pain while walking all day today. I'm chalking this up to the fact that I am stupid and didn't loosen my laces in the right spot for that tendon to flex.
- Run #3: Tempo Run. The schedule said to do a 6 mile tempo, but, because I suddenly remembered I was injured at the end, I only did 5 miles at tempo. The reason I suddenly remembered was because my foot felt GREAT. Almost as if it weren't injured. My little piggies were singing my praises (well, all except the one that has a nasty corn on one side).
So what did I do differently in this last run? Actually LOOSEN MY LACES so there wasn't so much pressure on top of my foot. But the other thing I did was (and this is pretty radical for yours truly) was WEAR DIFFERENT SHOES.
Lately I have been running in my Mizunos and Nikes, but this foot pain finally forced me out of my comfortable running shoe habits. I dug out my pair of Asics Gel Nimbus 13s, which are shoes I haven't worn since a half-marathon I ran in August. I slipped the shoe on my injured foot, and it felt different. It felt good. The pain diminished, especially after I loosened the laces in the front of the shoe rather than towards the heel.
I then slipped one of my Mizunos on my injured foot...and the pain was back. I noticed that there seems to be a part of the tongue of that shoe that was pressing on the tendon of my first metatarsal (where all the joyous pain is) which, after many many long runs in them, finally forced my extensor tendon to cry uncle and start being a huge pain in my ass. But that's merely a hypothesis at this point, a hypothesis that, at the moment, I am not willing to test repeatedly and get my research peer reviewed so I can publish that baby and become science famous yet not be able to run or walk properly.
It was just nice to have a good run. And a fast run, at that. It's also nice that I have really been sticking to my little eating manifesto, eating real food and real veggies and cooking those real food and real veggies and not shoving bad eatin' down my throat the minute I see its badness in the house. And I feel the better for it. Week one of this is in the books; let's see if I can make this a permanent lifestyle change.
And speaking of the fact that I can't think of a nice segue into this paragraph, I have a 22-mile run on the schedule for Saturday. I am going to try and run that distance, but I will do it much more slowly than I would have before this nagging injury of mine. I am also going to switch that run to Sunday, because I have a 5K that day in honor of St. Patty's Day (I am Irish; I am required to run a race. And then go drinking.) that day, and want to combine the mileage. So that means I get two days of cross-training until my next run.
That little piggie better get better by Sunday if he knows what's good for him. Or her, I guess.
photo credit: asparagus_hunter via photopin cc
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