Sidelined

Wednesday was National Running Day... or was it National Day of Running?

Whatever the occasion was, it was a day meant to have encouraged running. So what did I do to "celebrate" the occasion?

Nothing.

What have I done since running 13.1 miles on Sunday?

Nothing.

What will I do Thursday and Friday in preparation for Camp Pendleton?

Nothing.

Not. An. Effing. Thing.

Sigh.

I'm sidelining myself for the week. See, for a while now my heel has been feeling a bit tender, a bit strange. I first started to feel it around late March or early April. It always just felt tender, never really any pain save for once. I whacked it really hard getting out of a chair a few days before the Run Through Redlands. It was a piercing and splitting pain, so much so that I wondered for a bit whether I'd be able to run the half-marathon or not.

A few other times my daughters have hit me in the heel and have caused me to writhe in pain. Aside from that, it's mostly discomfort.

However, discomfort can quickly turn to pain and that can lead to injury and a layoff from running. And since I'm signed up for the San Francisco Marathon on July 25, I don't exactly want to take an injury-related layoff now, or ever really.

On the weekend, though, I had the chance to talk to my sister-in-law, my brother Danny's better half. She's a physical therapist by trade, has some piece of paper she calls a Master's Degree that says so, so I figured I'd ask her about my heel. She told me that she'd recommend taking two weeks off completely to rest it.

I felt like asking her if she was insane but thought better of it. Instead I told her that I didn't think that was possible given my Marathon training. She suggested I go ahead and run the Mud Run on Saturday (which she's also running incidentally) but not to run anything on Sunday.

"Damn," I thought to myself. "There goes my scheduled 12."

I asked for and received some advice from one of my super-duper blog buddies and she suggested not running this week as well, in addition to some other super tips.

I don't want to stop running and it's been tough this week not running. But I know that it's for the best. I'm not sure yet what I'm going to try and do next week, whether or not I will run some or if I'll try to get to an elliptical or bike or whatever. I don't anticipate feeling any pain after the race Saturday but again, it's not any sort of injury that could derail me soon that I'm worried about, it's something that could render me obsolete come July 25.

So what is that I have? Well, I guess I should have already mentioned it. It's possible that I have Achilles teondonitis. Common causes include running hills, overtraining, change in mileage, things like that. I don't think I'm overtraining - I haven't run more than 35 miles a week since January - but I have been hitting the hills hard. It's tough because I need to train on hills for San Fran but if that's causing me problems, perhaps I'd be better off staying away from them, or at least not including them as often as I have been.

This time of me not running will pass. It's been just three days since I last ran but I don't think I've gone three days without running since... don't recall, December probably. And the last time I went five days with no runs was in September when I got sick and was laid out for a week.

It's not fun, sitting on the sidelines, but it's better to ease up a bit now than it is to eat the San Francisco Marathon.