Injured Ungulate

Ungulate

This ungulate has a sore hoof!

Training has been going very well for the past few months. My mileage has been consistently strong. I’ve had some good long runs, and even mixed in some decent harder, quality workouts as well. I was really beginning to look forward to doing the Bear Mountain 50 miler on May 5. Then, of course, the inevitable happens, and you get hurt. The frustrating thing is that I didn’t hurt my foot by doing anything stupid, but it seems that I just had some bad luck during a run a few weeks ago.

The course for the Kingston 5 Peaks race needs to be changed this year, and being the Race Director I was checking out potential courses during a run. Everything was feeling good until I was running up a long climb on a bit of a traverse. My left foot was inverted inward for this entire climb, while running over some fairly technical terrain. This put strain on the outside of my left foot, and by the time I got to the top I could feel some pain. I just assumed that I’d dinged it a bit and things would come around in a few days.

I gave it a few easy days of running with the hope that it would improve, but it never really did. I booked an appointment for physio as I was now beginning to get a bit concerned. I always get hypersensitive on the rare times that I have foot pain and begin stressing that I may have a stress fracture. My mind was put to ease by our physio though. Stacee was convinced this wasn’t the case, but that the injury was caused by my foot being a little locked up, which didn’t allow it to move and flex properly. This in turn caused some irritation between my fourth and fifth metatarsals. Part of the problem from this might have been that this is the same leg where I broke my ankle a number of years ago, so I have less range of motion in it.

Injured ungulate with fancy tape job to relieve strain

I’ve had a couple of appointments now to try to free up the mobility in my foot, reduce the inflammation and work out some of the scar tissue. Stacee has a whole bag of tricks at her disposal. I am also throwing everything I can at it from my end at home as well with massaging, manipulation, foot rolling, Zanagen, Tanda and ice.

I’ve continued to do easy and short runs each day on the flat rail trail and this hasn’t felt too bad. Having my foot taped has taken some strain off of the injured area. As soon as I hit anything technical, I feel sharper pain though. At this point, I’m not too hopeful for Bear Mountain this weekend since it is a very technical course…which is really what appealed to both Sara and I to begin with. I’ll have to see how things progress over the next few days, and possibly get out to try a real trail run again and see how that goes. I’d really like to race, but not if it potentially sets me back.

This whole injury thing is quite frustrating, and even a little ironic since I had just finished writing an article that discussed injuries and returning to training approaches. Now, I’m finding myself having to listen to this very advice first hand.