Sharing The Pain

I kind of warned you in my last post: Let’s talk about pain (and see if it gets halved). While in theory I am a big fan of the whole “listen to your body” thing, “stop before you get injured” and so on, and while I even participated a Chi Running workshop lately (Mantra: easy and painless running), I have to face the fact that I am in pain. It is worst in the morning. A good morning is when I don’t have to hold on to the banister when I go down the stairs to the kitchen – in slow motion. The areas of pain have been shifting slowly. A year ago my calves and my right heel were killing me. My knees though only hurt, when I do 25k plus runs, they are normally fine in the morning. My calves are fine now. However, my glutes and hamstrings are worse than the calves ever had been. While my right heel is still a bit tender (joined by the left one) the most painful part of my battered legs is the spot under the left foot, where the arch ends and the heel begins. Every morning it feels like stepping into burning coals. I did some research and it is most likely what they call Heel Spur or Plantar Fasciitis. Reading this stuff up is a bit disheartening and I don’t want to bore you with all the details about potential therapy. The good thing is, my Heel/Plantar niggle is going on for quite while (since before the London Marathon) and is actually not getting much worse. Strangely it nearly disappeared straight after the marathons, but then slowly built up again. My current approach is more stretching. I have to admit, I find stretching boring, but should do it more often. As for my glutes and hamstrings I remain puzzled why this pain is not going away. What helped with my calves was massaging them, which fills me with similar excitement as stretching. Do I really have to knead my backside every night? Hm… Well, time to make a point. Thanks for reading, I am feeling better already.