Foot Report

Well, the Plantar Fasciitis is still feeling pretty good. A lot of the time I don’t feel anything walking around, but if I poke at the one spot on my foot then I can still feel some tenderness. I had an optimistic dream last night where Sweetie was telling me I was ready to be drastically increasing my weekly mileage.

On Friday, my doctor agreed that the pain I have been feeling is likely PF. She seemed to think that running 20 miles a week, as I have been while trying to recover, is reasonable. Her main treatment suggestion is to always, always wear supportive shoes, something I have heard but haven’t done. With that idea in mind, and thinking about how much I walked around in dress shoes in Europe, it starts to make more sense that my pain increased during my month there — despite not running very much at the time.

Saturday’s Run

Saturday morning I ran nine crappy miles in Vancouver. It was supposed to be one more, but my loop came to its completion at nine, and I didn’t have the gumption to run crappy mile number ten. If you want to give me a quarter to go buy some more gumption, I’d appreciate it.

It was just one of those bad workouts. They happen, you get through it, and the next one will be better. Or if not the next one, the one after that. If they don’t get better, maybe you’re overtraining… but since I’ve halved my weekly mileage for the last four weeks, I think I’m in the clear there.

It wasn’t my foot that made the run crappy. In fact, my foot felt great Thursday and Friday, and still pretty good over the weekend. I’m sure it will still have its ups and downs, but the two completely pain-free days in a row have made me an optimist.

I’m out

I’m officially dropped from the McKenzie River Trail Run 50K in September. My foot, while feeling a bit better (but it is so hard to tell when progress, good or bad, is so gradual), has not made the sort of miracle recovery that would allow me to step up my training to the point where I’d be accomplishing anything good, or even fun, by running it. Also, I’ll probably not be fully recovered then either, and 50K on trails is not what my foot will will be needing.

Disappointing? Yes, of course. Crushing? No, not really. I’m looking at the long term here. There will be other races. And at least I’m still running some, for the time being. Monday’s run was six miles, at an average 7:57 minutes per mile, with a lot of speeding up and slowing down. My lungs felt better than the previous week.

I’m still doing the hundred push ups program, now in week four (having repeated both weeks two and three, if I recall correctly). I’ve also gone down to the “column two” schedule instead of “column three”. GetFitSlowly has been posting about the program too, and judging from the comments it doesn’t seem like any normal humans manage to get to 100 push ups without repeating weeks. In other words, it’s not a six-week program, it’s eight, or ten, or…? That’s OK, but it would be nice if the base schedule were more realistic. Anyway, today I did 22 push ups, rested 90 seconds, then 17, rest, 17, rest, 15, rest, then 35. Thirty-five!

I’m off the strong antibiotic (Keflex) and onto the Doxycycline starting today. We’ll see how that goes.

Waterfront Loop

Saturday morning I ran the counterclockwise Selwood Bridge to Steel Bridge loop on the Willamette, my favorite flat pavement run in Portland. It’s 10.5 fast miles, with dramatic changes of scenery every two miles or so, from the contemplative path by Oaks Bottom to the buzzing eastside esplanade or the rapid high-rise construction zone of the South Waterfront. The loop would be a little bit shorter if you went the normal way and ran across the lower deck of the Steel, but when I was approaching it the lower deck was raising to let a barge through, so I climbed up and over the top deck instead.

During the run, my foot was a little bit sore for two or three miles. My legs felt OK, but my lungs felt a little tight or congested… a feeling I seem to have a lot when I’m on antibiotics. I haven’t switched to the long-term antibiotic yet, so maybe those won’t be as bad. I averaged around 8:45/mile.

What’s Up?

It has been brought to my attention that I haven’t blogged in a bit. It’s been a busy week at work, converting a huge codebase over to using a new IDE, compiler, and libraries, having skipped two previous iterations of the same over the last ten years.  Or three, if you count VC++ 7.0 (2002) and 7.1 (2003) as two different releases. In any case, it’s been a lot of upgrading. You would think, ten years later, that the new stuff would not only be super-awesome but would also bake cookies for you, but, as it turns out, the improvements seem largely incremental, as least from the perspective of a C++ coder.

My eye has continued to improve for now. I had it drained some more yesterday, which may have been unnecessary given how little was left in there, but the doctor thought it would be a good idea. The new plan to avoid it coming back again is for me to go on a long course of Doxycyline, which Wikipedia notes is not only useful for fighting tear-gland bacteria and similar things like acne, but also works against syphilis and chlamydia. I’m cautiously optimistic these side benefits will prove unutilized. As a +1 bonus, it’s prophylactic against malaria. Between the doxy and the gin and tonics, I should be pretty well set there.

Look, I know: antibiotics are bad. For you and for the world. Taking one for six months is crazy. So is having my eye explode every six months. Eenie, meenie, minie, Moe.

A whole weekend without running and the world didn’t end

I ran six miles tonight; the last time I ran before that was last Wednesday. (Unless if you count a half mile run between bars on Saturday as MeetIN Portland held its annual tribute-to-slash-simulation-of The Running of the Bulls.) I enjoyed running tonight. Even if it was hot and muggy, even if I ran slowly, six miles is still a lot better feeling than no miles.

Not for the weak of stomach

I was out and about yesterday, wearing sunglasses, since my eyelid was pretty bad to look at. It was swollen all over and the area right around the spot where I usually get the lump (“ground zero”) was especially red, angry, tight, and protruding. As time went on, it also started hurting more and more. There was a lot of pressure, plus frequent sharp pain.

Then something new happened. I’m not sure if I noticed it happening. I know it was silent, and if I felt it, I didn’t feel it very much. Some sixth sense told my something had happened. I inched my sunglasses away from my face, and there it was, a smear of something (ok, ok, pus) clinging to the central bottom portion of the inside of the left lens. Well, that’s it, my eye had burst. (No, just the lid. But still.)

The incredibly disgusting nature of what had occurred was tempered by the fact that the pain was gone. And I still wasn’t positive that the swelling had popped through the outside of the lid — maybe something shot out a tear duct in a strange way? Getting to a mirror settled that. Coming out of a little hole in the lid right at ground zero was a thick dribble of off-white pus. I wanted to throw up.

I’m feeling better now, the eye seems happier, and ground zero is starting to scab over. I wonder how bad the scar will be?

No whining

It’s been one of those weeks.

The eyelid is still swollen and occasionally painful.

The antibiotics seem to affect my digestion, energy, and mood.

The foot still hurts. I’m strongly considering dropping from the 50K in September.

In sum, it’s been hard to keep an upbeat mood. I’ve been working at it and mostly succeeding so far. So consider this post a vent rather than a whine.

Keep a lid on it

In late April, my recurrent chalazion (a painless lump within my eyelid) had gotten pretty big… then it disappeared on its own. This prompted me to cancel the procedure I was scheduled for (cutting out the chalazion and its containing “capsule”) since it wasn’t even clear if the doctor would be able to locate the right spot to cut, without the lump there.  This procedure wasn’t going to be done by my usual doctor at the eye practice I’d been going to for years, but by a guy at OHSU I’d gone to for a second opinion.

The lump has been coming back (in the same spot, as always) slowly since then, but it’s still pretty small. Yesterday I woke up and my eyelid felt tender. Sure enough, a few hours later, I could see a swelling starting, centered around the location of the hard lump. This has happened before, but not when the chalazion was so small. Clearly, though, it had gone infected. By mid-day the lid was swollen enough to be drooping and I called my old eye doctors, figuring they’d be able to see me faster. After a long long wait in the office (not that I’m not glad they fit me into the schedule) I’m on an antibiotic again. I hope it clears up quickly.

After that, assuming the lump’s still there, I’ll reschedule that procedure at OHSU. (The doctor at my original practice said they could do that too, and even made some comment about “teaching Dr. ___ [the new doctor] everything he knows”, which I didn’t explore, but really they’ve had a lot of chances at this thing and haven’t found an answer yet, so I’m still thinking it’s the new guy’s turn.) If it still comes back after that, and I hope it doesn’t, I suppose I’ll try another course of action suggested by my old doctors: get it excised once more and follow that up with a lengthy (months and months) course of doxycycline. I’ve been resistant to this one so far, but options are running out and the eye seems to be getting less predictable as time goes by: a slowly growing lump is one thing, but a ticking infection timebomb waiting to blow up is another.

I hate my eyelid.

Ten miles on the track; foot update; push ups

Saturday, to try to take it easy on my foot for my curtailed long run, I did 10 miles on the track. Forty laps. I don’t think I’ll be doing that again. What drudgery. Making matters worse, my Garmin Forerunner ran out of battery life before I even got started, so I had to count laps myself. I grabbed a long blade of grass every mile and built a little pile of them by my water bottle, to help keep track.

Physically, the run was fine. I woke up that morning with some foot pain and some sciatica, but after a mile or two, both were gone, not to appear again for the rest of the day. I didn’t keep track of time carefully, but the miles were somewhere between 9:30 and 10:00 each.

I think my foot is, on average, feeling better. The icing and stretching and taping continues.

I’m still working through the hundred pushups thing. I just tried day one of week three, and it was a killer… I couldn’t get through it, or even get all that close. So I’m going to repeat week two again.

Live on tape

I’ve iced, ibuprofened, stretched, massaged, and taped. That should clear up the plantar fasciitis in no time, right? Right? I’ve added taping to my regimen since someone in my running group last night suggested it and showed me how she does it. The tape certainly changes the way it feels; for good or bad I can’t say.

Six slow miles last night, my first run this week. The heat (high 80s) and humitidy were a bit brutal.

My name is Scott and I have plantar fasciitis

Admitting that my struggles with a chronic injury have gotten to (or past) the point where I really need to do something about it is hard. I feel like an alcoholic, hiding my condition from the world as I go on bender after bender, week after week. No longer: I clearly have plantar fasciitis in my right foot, it’s not getting better on its own, and I need to address it. If that means I reduce or quit running for a while, so be it. If that means I withdraw from the McKenzie River Trail Run, I’ll have to grin and bear it. (Note to self: if I withdraw before July 31st, I get a partial refund.)

This started sometime during my training for the Eugene marathon. I’d wake up with some heel or arch pain that would go away pretty quickly. A while later, I started feeling it after long periods sitting at my desk, too. In May, I was running a lot less but walking a lot more and I continued to feel it, and more often during the day as well. This was never a severe pain at all. Just a little thing. Exactly the sort of pain that fools you into thinking you don’t need to do anything about it. Especially because it goes away while running.

As I ramped up my mileage after getting back from Europe, I kept feeling it. In the last month, it’s changed, too, from a painful sensation to a burning one. It’s become a little more localized too, maybe. It’s on the inside edge of the bottom of my right foot, where the heel meets the arch. At virtually the same time that it turned from painful to burning, I started feeling it pretty much all day, whenever I would walk.

That’s where it stands now. It’s still a mild sensation, not debilitating in any way… yet. But it’s getting worse and worse and I need to do something. My first order of business: for two weeks, reduce my mileage by 50% or so, stick to flat courses, ice my foot a lot, and take two ibuprofen a day. If I don’t see improvement after that, I’ll see a doctor.