A Chronic Pain In The Butt

My very sore achilles tendon has nothing to do with tension induced pain and everything to do with why we don't heal!

Long story-short: I severely turned my ankle 18 months ago. I had x-rays and knew that nothing was broken. The ankle took about a 12 week rehab to where I could train for LA marathon. I preceded to avg 100 mi weeks of fairly intense training for
five months leading up to LA. Ran LA and kept training for another couple of months-April-May of 2006. No ankle or tendon problems at all during this entire period. I have been running for over 25 yrs and have never had an achilles injury.

June and July were easy months of running averaging anywhere from 30-50 mi weeks at a low intensity.
In july I began to notice my achilles tendon was sore while I was driving my car. I would gently massage the tendon and Wow, it was really sore. I ignored it since I was not training for anything and it did not effect my running.

August I started to train again and my achilles was getting worse, I mean it was really sore to the touch. Since I knew that I had not injured it and I knew it was not tension related I was certain it would go away fairly easily just as it had appeared.

As I stepped up my running in Sept. I came to the realization that I needed to do something to heal it. I started to ice and self-massage a couple of times per day, with asprin every now and then, however, I would go days with doing nothing as well. As you can figure the tendon did not get better or worse it just remained an annoyance to my training. My ( laziness, ignorance, waiting and hoping) lasted for all of Oct and half of Nov.

Finally I was really frustrated. To the point that I had to get this fixed. And I almost started searching for someone when I decided to make a dedicated intention to myself to put and keep my attention on my self-treatments.

Here is my point. This is where many of you are in healing from tension induced pain. Usually it is the ultimate frustration that allows you in some way to even accept the tension induced pain diagnosis. Yet, while accepting it, you are still waiting, hoping, expecting somehow that the pain will just go away. You have accepted the diagnosis, but are not even remotely ready for the comittment it is going to take to heal.

Okay, so I began to ice and self massage, and foam roll 4-5 times per day, every day. I stepped up my self-treatments from a casual 10 minutes a day to anywhere from 2-4 hours per day. Yes, I would massage 4-5 times per day for 10-15 mins. and I would ice for 4-5 times for 20 min. each time. No days off, not even half days off. And guess what, within a week I had reduced the swelling significantly and was back to running without the soreness/stiffness in the tendon. And here I am today
1 week later with almost no signs of achilles tendinitis. just a little stiffness in the morning.

Even when we are aware of a problem, be it tension induced or an injury, if we go into that (waiting, lazy, hoping, searching) mode---nothing is going to happen except more frustration and pain.

Cheeck your self....where is your acceptance and where is your attention and where is your comittment. You just may find your solution within you.

Monte Hueftle
http://www.runningpain.com
monte@runningpain.com