Week 23 Wrapup

I took the whole last week off to try to heal my leg. Then, I ran Monday and Wednesday of this week, and it didn't feel any better. So, I went to the doctor on Friday to see what he would have to say about it. I thought the most likely scenario would be a variation of the classic "Doc, it hurts when I do this", "Well stop doing that!". I still wanted to go, though, in case I developed a stress fracture that required two months of immobilization or something like that.

The doctor felt around a few places, and based on the location of the pain, diagnosed it as shin splints. That's kind of what I figured, although this is a completely different kind of pain than the shin splints I'm used to. That's to be expected, I guess, with a completely non-specific term like "shin splints", which is used to describe pretty much any pain in the shin. In my particular case, the muscle was tearing away from the shin at a specific point of attachment. My previous pains when I first started running were just general soreness of undeveloped shin muscles.

He had me take off my socks and stand in bare feet and said instantly, "Oh yeah, your feet are not any good for running". He could see that my arches were flat, and my whole foot rolled inward. This was kind of surprising, because I never thought I had a flat arch. I had done the "wet foot test" a couple of times, where you wet your foot, step on a smooth surface, and then compare your footprint to see what type of foot/arch you have. Mine always looked normal on that. He explained that even if the skin on the inside on my foot isn't touching the ground, it's way lower than it should be for my foot/ankle/leg to keep everything in alignment. He then moved my foot around to visually demonstrate the difference between having my ankle straight when I'm standing, and what it's like with it rolled in like I usually have it.

This was very interesting to me, because I always wondered why I went from a size 11 to a size 12 about 10 years ago. Turns out my foot didn't get bigger, just flatter as a consequence of age (and probably weight). Makes perfect sense in hindsight, though.

Treatment for the shin splints is anti-inflammatory, ice, and rest. Long-term solution is better shoes or inserts for my current shoes. Turns out he had a very similar problem, and pulled out the inserts out of his own shoes to show them to me.

As far as shoes go, in my case, I'm an overpronator, but not necessarily like the classic overpronator who rolls in too much with every step. I'm already rolled in too much when my foot hits, and when I toe-off. So, I may not need a heavy duty motion control or stability shoe, but rather just some arch support. I'll certainly need to experiment some.

So, I went to the shoe store on Saturday and got two inserts. One's a stability insert with a hard plastic heel to keep the foot from rolling after the heel strike, and the other just has a big ol' uncomfortable hump in the arch to provide support there, and keep the foot rolled out. I'll try them both over the next couple of months and see how they work.