Heeding the Call to Heal the Heel

I have found my runner’s Achilles heel, and it is my Achilles tendon. I had some nagging pain starting in the middle of summer. I am an older, bigger, born-with-the-sloth-gene runner, so I get random pains all the time. It’s my knees, or my toes, or my hip. Despite all the good advice to the contrary, generally I ignore the pain, and generally it mysteriously vanishes.

I told myself all sorts of stories about the new tendon pain. I convinced myself that it was just stiffness or some mild tendonitis, and stretching and icing it down would be a completely sufficient way to deal with it. I believed it couldn’t be a serious problem, because both ankles were bothering me, and what were the chances of tears in both tendons at the same time. I said all this to myself even when the pain in the right tendon turned sharp and a hard bump formed on the ankle.

Then one day something happened that could have either been a dose of reality or another opportunity for delusion. I forgot to pack socks in my gym bag for a six-mile run on the treadmill, and I ran all six miles anyway. For days after that run, the inflammation on my ankle was screaming red, huge and very painful. I stopped running for about a week, and asked every runner I saw what I should do. Everyone said “go see a doctor,” until I got to the person I was looking for, the one who said “it could be your shoes.” So I went to the running store to change shoes.

The tendon felt better after a week off from running, and I embraced the idea that it was just a shoe problem after all. The pain, however, came back quickly. But it returned just a few weeks before the Philadelphia Distance Run, so I decided to do a three-week taper, run the PDR, and then see where I stood.

I had a fantastic PDR, considering that I had hardly run at all for a full month leading up to it. My time was 2:02:53, a personal record by more than nine minutes and very close to my ultimate half-marathon goal of breaking two hours. I felt so good that I went for a run again two days later. Walking home after the run, I again had sharp pain.

I was finally ready to accept reality. My Achilles tendon was injured enough to require a doctor’s visit and to stop me from running at all until I knew what was wrong with it. I did not want to see a doctor before this because I knew the doctor would tell me to stop running, maybe for months. I finally went to a podiatrist this week. He told me to stop running, and he is absolutely right. He believes the tendon has tears in it, and if I keep pressing the issue, it could rupture completely. We’re going to confirm this with an MRI, but the reason I finally broke down to go see a doctor is that deep down, I know he’s right.

So I have to ignore the beautiful perfect autumn running weather happening all around me. Instead I sit bored to tears on an exercise bike in the gym, and will be doing a lot of standing on one foot under the supervision of a physical therapist. And through all of this, I keep repeating my new mantra: “you’re lucky it didn’t snap; you’re lucky it didn’t snap…”