Good news from the physio

After completely resting my Achilles for a week I visited my physiotherapist at the Crystal Palace Sports Injury Clinic at the athletics stadium. I have to say that I was a little bit worried about what they were going to say but my injury had healed well over the 7 days and I felt a lot more cheerful about the up coming marathon.

The physio listened to what I did in training before first looking at my shoes. He took one look at my feet and told me that my shoes weren't giving me enough support. This suprised me as I had always thought I was was a mild over-pronator but it seems that I turn more as I ran than I've always thought. This was one possible contributor to my injury.

The next thing the physio did was have a really good feel of my calf muscles. His assessment was immediate, they were incredibly tight but considering the amount of running I have been doing this was not surprising. He recommended some deep (and quite uncomfortable) tissue massage and a series of stretches designed to target the range of different muscles in the lower leg.

The tightness of the muscles combined with inadequate stretching before and after exercise and wearing running shoes that don't provide enough support all contributed to my Achilles tendinitis. the fact that I was increasing my mileage to around 20 miles for my LSDR simply provided the final straw.

So, what about the recovery? Well the massage and the stretching exercises are pretty straight forward. As there are only three weeks until the race, there isn't enough time to do another long run which is in fact a blessing in disguise as long runs are completely out of the question. I've been told to keep my running light, do some low impact exercises (i.e, head to the gym and get on the cross trainer or get in the pool), do a lot of stretching and finally, acupuncture.

Acupuncture is something new to me. My physio suggested it as a way of relaxing specifically tight areas as well as encouraging the healing process. I've never had it before but actually found it quite a pleasant experience. A few minutes after the needles were inserted I experienced a warming sensation located along my Achilles and lower calf muscle. I was suprised as to how deep the needles went, a good couple of inches in some places.

More generally the injury has given me cause for reflection. I thought that the whole training program was going particularly well, in fact, even after the long run that led to the injury, I still felt happy with how I was doing. But even with this, my third marathon, eight half marathons under my belt with all the thousands of miles of associated training , I'm mildly suprised that I could have got everything so wrong. Perhaps I have been slightly over confident with this marathon, building up the mileage too far too quickly.

It just goes to show, that even with the experience , I can still make mistakes with my training, pushing myself too hard and eventually breaking down.