Not as bad as I'd feared...

I you know me very well you know one thing. I am the world’s most easily worried human. Give me just a glimmer of the possibility of something bad and my crazy imagination will run with it. You can imagine what’s been running through my brain since yesterday’s run. It’s been extremely painful to walk, put on or take off shoes, basically painful to do anything involving my right foot. My brain had come up with plenty of horrible possibilities. Sometimes I wonder why I listen to myself. The only bad think I hadn’t considered was amputation!! Of course my brain never came up with a scenario where things were fairly okay and it was a minor injury, not my brain.

Well, this afternoon I visited my doctor to have her take a look and give me the bad news. Of course first up was a series of three x-rays. I’ve never had a foot x-rayed. This cannot end well. They would only do x-rays if something’s VERY wrong, so says my brain. The doctor looked at the x-rays in the room with me for a couple minutes then asked me to describe what had happened that led to the pain starting. She knows I recently ran my first marathon, so I didn’t have to go into a long story of how much I run, she knows. I told her that yesterday I was doing a 14 mile treadmill run at the gym, so nothing to long, not like a marathon distance or anything, just 14 miles. I felt great the whole time, no pain, no discomfort, nothing. Then with just a tenth of a mile left it got just a fraction stiff. Afterwards when I started my normal cool down walk I couldn’t put weight on my right foot. Not at all, extreme pain. Not a little sore PAIN. She pressed on my foot going from the ankle to the toes and told me to tell her any spots that caused pain. There were only a couple spots and the pain was isolated to the top of my foot. She said that she saw no evidence at all of a brake or stress fracture. Based on that and where the pain was in my foot she believes that I aggravated a tendon in the top of my foot. She prescribed Naproxen to help get the swelling and inflammation down. She also instructed me to not work out at all this week then next week start working back into it slowly stopping any time I started to feel any sort of pain in my foot. I am to stay off of my feet as much as possible this week, keep it elevated and ice it a couple times a day. She said that she sees no reason that I can’t be back up to form in plenty of time for my half marathon on 4/16 (almost 3 weeks). I probably won’t be able to hit the 1:45 I wanted to shoot for, but I’m still hopeful to get under the 2 hour mark.

That was all definitely good news. I definitely don’t want to go a full week with no running at all, but I had expected her to tell me I’d be out at least 4-6 weeks, so 1 week suddenly seems like no big deal! On a very uplifting note for me personally, she paid me quite a compliment. She told me that after my physical in January she was so impressed and inspired by me getting ready to run a marathon that she printed out the Couch-To-5k plan that I did when I first started and she is planning on doing a 5k this spring!! It is always such an awesome compliment to be told that I played some part in someone living a more active lifestyle for themselves!