1/25/21
Taper – Microcycle 1 – Monday
Rest Day!
But, with 3 x 15 eccentric heel drops.
Ensure to walk a lot.
Breakdown
Just like everyone else, sometimes I get injured. For me, that happened last weekend. During last weekend’s 30 mile run, my Achilles tendon had a poping feeling and sure enough, it’s Achilles tendonitis.
I’ve been fighting through it, making sure I roll the calf to ease tension on the tendon as well as using a TENS unit on the area of the injury.
Going into Saturday I had to weigh the risk of injuring it more and missing one of the longest runs prior to race day. I took the risk and lost. I did finish, but it was under the influence of Tylenol and ibuprofen. And really making sure I maintained an upright form. Still managed about a 9-minute mile pace for the first 20 or so and 9:30 pace for the last 10. Though if you factor in water stops and a stop to massage out my calf, it averaged at about 11:00 pace with a total of 5.5 hours,
Good news is, I wasn’t tired at the end, Not really being able to push it due to the tendon.
Going into Sunday, I could barely walk, swollen right ankle and a large lump right in the middle of the tendon.
No 20 mile run for me.
Spent the day foam rolling and forcing myself to walk, mostly to help with the scar tissue.
The next steps will be eccentric heel drop buildups 3 times a day at 15 reps each, similar to how lower back recovery is done. Along with moving to an IF diet to use some autophagy to my benefit. From there it will largely be biking, making sure I walk alot, and easy trial runs to build back up for race day.
Tendons do well with loads and to make sure the tears in it heal (there’s a bad joke here) correctly you have to keep moving it. This breaks down misaligned scar tissues and builds them back up the correct way.
The negatives help with aligning the tendons, but also strengthen the calf at end ranges. Where there is strength there is range of motion. So, building out the muscle at a stretched out range will do well for that as well.
So, what do I think the culprit was?
Super tight calves and worn-out shoes. I wear zero drop shoes and over time (guessing close to a thousand miles) I’ve worn the heel down to being an inverted heel drop. My calves I’ve been worried about being tight for a while, but I’ll admit, I can be lazy like the rest of us and decided to deal with it instead of taking care of it (wrong choice). Both dumb errors that could have been avoided, oh well, time to deal with the consequences… 4 weeks until game day.
*Side note, sorry for the lack of post yesterday, I’ve been having some technical difficulties. I filled it for the historical sake of what the training should have been.