As someone’s grandma used to say, “You would do well to have such problems.” I don’t have such problems, but I have other problems on a somewhat lesser degree. In two weeks I have my last triathlon of the season. The idea this year was to only do sprint distance triathlons and see how fast I could get. I’ve tailored an entire year towards this, and this triathlon is the big one for me where I go all out, using everything I’ve learned from the previous races.

Then, a few days ago, we ran out of printer paper. On Monday I went to Office Depot to pick up a $25/box of printer paper. I found the box, and hoisted it onto my shoulder and walked to the checkout counter. I paid for it, hoisted it onto my shoulder again, and carried it to the car. Once home, I hoisted it onto my shoulder again and carried it inside. No big deal, right?

Later that day, my arm started hurting around the shoulder area and down a bit toward my elbow. “Uh-oh,” I thought, “Did I overdo it? Pull something? Strain something? Bruise something?” I figured perhaps it would go away overnight. The next morning I was supposed to have a swim workout, but my arm hurt even worse than before. I skipped the workout, since the movements that were causing the pain seemed to be similar to the movements I would make while swimming.

Today it still hurts, and I skipped my bike and run workouts because I’m afraid even those might make it worse. The pain doesn’t occur all the time, only when I move in certain ways. Picking up my 30 lb kid, for example, doesn’t hurt at all. But if I’m sitting at my desk with my right hand on my lap, and then raise it to start typing, the act of raising my arm five inches to the desk hurts quite a bit. Steering a car doesn’t hurt, but lifting my arm to the steering wheel does, as does lifting my arm to push buttons on the car radio. And yes, today it hurts just as bad as it did yesterday, or at least I think it does.

So will the end of my season be ruined? Will I not be in peak shape due to missing out on training leading up to my race? Will I even be able to race at all? I don’t know, but it’s kind of annoying that even have to think about this, and of course I can’t blame anyone or anything but myself. But little did I know that hoisting a box like that would lead to an injury, although I must confess there was a little voice in the back of my mind that told me to go get a shopping cart. But maybe something else in my mind was telling me that the 16-year old kid working at Office Depot would be really impressed if I just picked up that box like it was nothing. Stupid, stupid, stupid. But I guess it could be worse. At least I’m not a professional triathlete with chiseled features and the body of a Greek god worrying about losing out on hundreds of thousands of dollars.

A month later, and it still hurts, but I don’t want to pay a physical therapist again, so I’m just going to start working out again, albeit slow and easy. My hunch is that the problem stems primarily from a lack of core strength and hamstring flexibility. How did I come to that conclusion? Oh, just stuff people have said and things I’ve read. It’s just a guess. But it can’t hurt to strengthen my core, which has never been strong, and it can’t hurt to be more flexible, which I’ve never really been. So we’ll see how it goes.

In my case, it’s doubtful the injury I sustained last night will keep me from doing the Boise half-Ironman, but it does have the potential to slow me down.

Last night, we had some family over for dinner. My two-year old daughter gets pretty excited when the cousins are over, and she was in her normal bubbly, giggly, silly mood. It’s cute as all get-out, and so we indulge her screaming and yelling and running around with the digital camera…wait, we should probably get that digital camera from her or she’s going to break it or hurt someone with it as she swings it around. I asked her to give the digital camera to me, and while sometimes she’s obedient, ofttimes it becomes a game of keep-away with her running, and me chasing. Of course I can catch her, but she has her last resort in this game, which is to throw whatever it is that she’s trying to keep me from getting. Our digital camera is one of the clunkier, older types, and there were smaller children around (although an adult could easily be seriously injured by a blow to the head from this camera), so I rushed to get it before she could chuck it in a random direction that might be in line with someone’s nose or eye.

As I reached for the camera, she wound up to throw it, and I just missed getting a firm grip on it. I knocked it out of her hand just as she had it over her head. It fell, striking a glancing blow to my daughter’s head, but not hard enough to make her cry or even pause in her laughter, and then the camera fell on the top of my bare foot. Of course, rather than the flat side of the camera hitting the flat top of my foot, the camera impacted on my foot with all its weight on one corner, driving it into the top of my right foot towards the front and outside.

If this happened a month ago, or a month from now, I wouldn’t be writing about it. But given that I’ve got an important race in three days, what would otherwise be a very minor foot injury is now causing me some slight worry. It doesn’t hurt that much, but it did leave a pretty good little bruise, and it does still hurt 12 hours later. And it feels like it could hurt even more after a long bike ride. I can definitely see myself six miles into the half-marathon and having to walk or drop out if it flares up. Then again, I could see the pain fading away in the next three days and being completely unnoticeable by race morning. I’ve never injured the top of my foot like this, so I don’t really know. All I know is that at the moment it hurts when I move it, and it hurts enough that it seems like it could get worse with use.

So what’s the point of me writing about all this? Just to show that while everyone thinks those who do Ironman races are determined, steely, tough individuals, in reality we’re turned into total wimps who can’t sustain the smallest injury without it turning our worlds upside down.

The latest running injury is to the outside of my right foot. It happened during my recent marathon. I didn’t notice it at all during the race, but immediately afterwards the right side of my right foot, or the outside of my right foot, started to hurt–a lot. So much so that although I had plenty of things hurting below my waist, what caused me to limp more than anything as I walked to our car to drive home was the pain in the outside of my right foot. When I say “outside” let me get more specific.

It doesn’t hurt on the bottom, it hurts more on the top. You could think of it as the exact opposite side of the foot from the arch. It’s on the top, maybe a little bit on the side, but definitely not on the bottom. It’s not right below the ankle, but a little ways forward of the ankle. And sometimes it sort of runs from that area of the top-outside of my foot to my ankle. Sometimes it feels as though the pain is going through my ankle, or like my ankle is crushing something.

There has been no swelling, no bruising, and there is zero pain when the foot is not in use. That is, I only feel pain if I get up and walk around, but if I’m sitting there is no pain, even if I put weight on my foot or toes. I’ve had enough broken bones to believe this isn’t a stress fracture. I’m pretty sure it’s just a strained tendon/ligament/muscle.

A long distance runner friend of mine asked me if I ran the marathon on the side of the road. I told him yes, since the marathon was almost entirely run on the right sides of roads. He told me this was the issue that had caused the injury, since the right side of the road tends to slope downwards, making your running uneven and forcing your right foot to the right each time you step.

Just think of your foot stepping on the ground as you’re running. Imagine you’re looking at your foot from the rear of it. Each time you step, you would ideally land on your toes, more or less flat on the ball of your foot, or slightly on the inside. But if the ground slopes to the right, then each time your right foot comes down, it touches down on the inside, but as your full weight is applied it falls to the right side, or outside of your right foot, putting extra strain on outside of your right foot as it sort of “rolls” that way. This would also put extra strain on the connection between that part of your foot and your ankle, should something be there to connect the two.

If that’s what happened, then fair enough, I know what cause the problem. But if it hasn’t gone away after a week and a half of rest, then how do I get it to heal, can I keep running and have it heal at the same time, and how do I make sure this doesn’t happen again? Sounds like it’s time to call my physical therapist.

Dialing…

Ok, Jonathan said he couldn’t tell me exactly what it was without examining it, but this was his advice:

1. Stretch that area of the foot by lifting the foot off the floor/ground, pointing the toe, and moving your toes in a circle or “roll” your foot around. It’s true that I do feel something there when I do this.

2. Ease into running again. He didn’t say to stay away from running, but to avoid overdoing it. He said it might take a few runs and a bit of stretching to get rid of the pain.

3. If it’s still hurting a week from now, make an appointment and come get it worked on.

If I were rich, I’d move #3 to the top of the list, but since I’m not I’ll follow his advice and hope for the best.

Normally I walk for 1-2 minutes before I start running, mostly because it takes that long for my Garmin to pick up satellites, but also because I like the warm up time. This morning my Garmin connected faster, and I was in a hurry, so I walked perhaps 10 steps before I started running.

As I started out, the back of my lower right leg, just above the Achilles tendon area where it enters my calf, felt a little stiff. Just a tiny, tiny bit. This is not an abnormal feeling for me at first, and it usually goes away after 15-30 seconds of light running. The stiffness went away, but continued feeling tiny, sharp pains even after 15-20 minutes when I was plenty warmed up. It wasn’t enough to impede me from running, but enough that I was noticing it and thought it was a bit abnormal. About 30-35 minutes into my run, I thought maybe I just had a tendon or ligament out of place, and walking might help it get back into place. As it turned out, it hurt more walking than it did running. I tried running again, and that hurt less than walking, but it didn’t feel right, and it wasn’t getting better. I stretched, starting out with a calf stretch but then bending my knee, and that triggered the pain and made it feel worse again, so I stopped it. The pain was not bad at all, but I knew something was going on at this point and that it wasn’t just a matter of getting warmed up or working through it.

I walked-ran back home, and took a short cut. I found that going uphill was the worst. As soon as I got home and cooled down, it stiffened up and has been feeling kind of swollen. Not a lot, and there’s nothing visible, but it’s stiff and thick. If I raise my toe, it doesn’t hurt immediately, but as I get to where I would normally feel a stretch it hurts. Not too bad, but it’s stiff and sore. If I point my toe downwards, so that the tendon gets bunched up, it also hurts (I also noticed when I had shoes on that when I did this the back of my shoe pressed on my tendon and that hurt as well).

To sum up, the pain is not bad, and only hurts when I move. It doesn’t feel like a bad injury, but I do think it’s injured at least slightly.

I called my coach and he diagnosed it as most likely being a lightly strained soleus muscle, rather than my Achilles tendon. He had told me to do calf lift exercises (standing on a small step with my toes and raising my body up with the weight on my toes to strengthen my calves) a few weeks ago, but I forgot to, and he said doing that might have prevented this injury. But before I can start doing that exercise, I need to recover, and that means two things:

1. RICE (rest, ice, compression, elevation)

2. Elipticals. Argh! I like running outside. I do not like doing anything inside that I can do outside. But since my coach recommends not running outside for 7-10 days, I’m replacing my runs with elipticals until I can work outside runs back into the mix. This is the only way I can fully maintain my run fitness and muscles, which I really, really don’t want to lose this close to my first marathon. My coach said he was injured three weeks before a triathlon and trained those last three weeks on an eliptical and ended up doing his best 10K ever in that race, even compared against 10K races that were just 10Ks, not triathlons. I’ve got a 2.5 hour run scheduled for Wednesday that I was really looking forward to proving myself on (it would be my longest run ever) but I guess I’ll be proving whether I can handle an eliptical for that long instead.

So the other day I was swimming, freestyle, and everything felt fine. I had swam about 1,000 meters, not as hard as I could, but at a decent clip, perhaps 5-10% harder than normal, and all of a sudden my left arm, on the front, in between my shoulder and elbow, but more towards the shoulder, started to hurt. I finished my lap and stood up in the pool, feeling my arm and stretching it in different directions. I was feeling slight twinges when I moved my arm, but they were very slight and unpredictable. I decided to keep on swimming, but every time I lifted my left arm for the recovery portion of the stroke, I would get a sharp pain in that same area, such that I only made it through three strokes and realized my swimming was over for the day. It’s not that it hurt all that bad, but I could tell that if I kept swimming it was only going to get worse, and that I shouldn’t push it.

I talked to my coach and he told me it’s my deltoid muscle. There are three parts to this muscle and it appears I injured the anterior deltoid muscle, which is the part of your deltoid on the front of your shoulder/arm. The three questions I then asked were; 1) how did this happen, 2) how do I get better, and 3) how do I keep this from happening again?

1. I don’t know how it happened, but my coach said sometimes you can strain the deltoid but it doesn’t start hurting exactly when you hurt it. This seems to make sense, because I don’t know how I could have hurt it swimming. After all, all I’m doing is lifting my arm through the air, so there’s no resistance other than the weight of my arm, and I’ve been swimming for some time and this has never happened before. It seems much more likely to me that I strained it doing something else out of the ordinary, and I think I might know what it was. I think it was due to picking up 45 lb weights in the weight room with my left arm, and using my deltoid to then lift my arm up to lift the weight and re-rack them. Or it could totally be something else, I don’t know. If you have any ideas, let me know.

2. Most of the websites out there specify ice and rest, which is what I’m trying to do, although not very well. That is, I’m not swimming with my arm, but I’m still doing other things, and today I hurt it even worse. How? Toweling off after a shower. Evidently I was a bit vigorous while drying my legs off, because it strained the muscle and now it has been hurting a lot worse all day. I can’t drive anymore, and just about every movement I make hurts. Luckily there’s no swelling and it doesn’t hurt if I don’t use it. Oh, and I haven’t yet iced it once…kind of lazy about that. Hey, I’m busy, you know? But I probably should do that.

3. Strength training, and stretching. Here’s a simple video on how to stretch your anterior deltoid muscles. Here’s a dull but correct video on how to strengthen the anterior deltoid muscle.

Anyway, my right knee has been clicking when I ride my bike. Or maybe it’s popping. Whatever you want to call it, it makes a noise and feels weird, but it doesn’t hurt. Just the same, it’s the type of thing I worry about, because it certainly isn’t normal and seems like it could be a bad thing.

My memory could be faulty, but I don’t think it’s ever happened before. Ok, my memory is coming back quickly, actually I think it has happened before. But if I remember correctly, it would click 2-3 times when I started biking, and then would go away for the rest of the ride. And it wouldn’t always happen when I biked, just occasionally. But now it happens virtually ever time I bike, and it’s not just as the beginning, but happens several times during each ride. I’ll be riding along and all of a sudden my right knee will start popping/clicking as it reaches the top of the rotation and I start pressing down.

I’ve experimented a few times, and although I haven’t been as scientifically observant as I could be (don’t blame me, it’s the ADD), I think the degree to which I allow my knee to stray away from the bike affects it. That is, if I keep my knee tucked close to the bike frame throughout the rotation, it seems to pop less, although it still does sometimes. If I let my knee get lazy and stray away from the bike it pops more. If so, this seems to be a good thing since my knee should be close to the frame, but since it still happens occasionally regardless of my knee’s horizontal position, I would still like to figure out what’s going on.

Once again, there is absolutely no pain. I wouldn’t even say it’s uncomfortable. It’s only concerning, because it’s hard for me to believe I could be making so much noise and feel such a powerful pop in my knee and have it not be a bad thing for it to be happening repeatedly.

I found this answer on Trifuel.com to a similar query:

The most likely cause of these symptoms is ‘snapping’ of your hamstrings tendon. There are several which run to the lateral (outside) and medial (inside) aspects of the knee. Occasionally these will snap over the tibia medially or the fibula laterally and cause a mechanical snap. Usually this is not painful but can be annoying. If it occurs over many repetitions it can cause inflammation over the tendon fat pads behind the knee. Often if you “rotate’ your knee slightly, ie turn the foot in or out the feeling will go away. Stretching helps.

I have wondered if my saddle was too low, but I adjusted it upwards and that didn’t fix it. But perhaps a slight adjustment of my shoe would do the trick. Perhaps more experimentation is in order…or, let’s call the physical therapist…one sec…

Ok, here’s what Jonathan at Orrock-Mendenhall in Lehi had to say–the bottom line was there’s no urgent need for me to check myself into immediate care. He said I should make sure my knee cap is nice and loose, meaning I should be doing plenty of quad and IT band stretches. He said to keep an eye on it and if it doesn’t improve over time, then I should come in and have it checked out so that they can see where my muscles/ligaments/tendons/etc. are tight and what may be causing it. So I’m going to keep on doing and expect different results in the future. Insanity? I think not.

The pain is on the interior of my right heel (see red dot on diagram to the right). It is not in the ankle. It is not inside my foot, but close to the surface, although not on the surface of the skin. It feels as though it is just under the surface of the skin.

The pain does not appear to be triggered by movement, nor can I make it go away through movement. Pressing in the area does not trigger the pain nor help it go away. I have had the pain while sitting down and while standing up. If it happens while I’m sitting down and I stand up and start walking it doesn’t go away and vice versa, although it’s a bit hard to measure since it generally comes and goes so quickly. I will say that I do not recall having the pain while running or doing any highly-physical activity.

The pain is definitely nerve related. It is an electrical shock type of pain. It is quite strong, but bearable because it is very brief. It never last longer than half a second, although I might feel it several times within a few seconds. It tends to pulse. It’s timing is very similar to a muscle spasm. You know how sometimes a muscle in your arm or leg will start jumping, and you can look at it and it’s just jumping along by itself? That’s similar to how this pain comes and goes, except muscle spasms seem to be fairly consistent in their timing whereas this is not. Whereas a muscle spams might follow a beep-beep-beep-beep-beep type of rhythm, this pain is a beep-beep-buh-beep-buh-beep-beep-buh-beep-buh-beep-buh-buh-beep, etc. In between each “beep” there is zero pain. That is, it hurts a ton for half a second, is 100% gone for half a second, and then 100% hurting for half a second.

Sometimes an “episode” will last for a few seconds. However, as of yesterday I have been having more episodes and the episodes are lasting substantially longer. I would say I’ve been having an episode the entire time I’ve been writing this post, although some of the pauses have been up to a minute.

If I had to guess, I’d say that a very small muscle has somehow become attached to a nerve, and when that muscle spasms it triggers the nerve pain. But the muscle is so small that I don’t feel the actually muscle doing anything. That’s what it seems like, but I don’t know if that’s even possible. I’ve never experienced anything remotely like this.

The good part is that since the pain is not motion dependent it is not debilitating per se, except that the pain is so strong and intense that it makes me want to tear my shoe and sock off and grind a screwdriver into my heel to see if that will stop the pain, it doesn’t stop me from doing anything. I can bike, run, and swim just fine. Even though the pain is intense I treat it like an itch–it’s annoying, but I can ignore it for the most part. Anyway, maybe I’ll figure it out someday. I just hope it doesn’t get any worse. Sometimes the pain is so bad that it feels as though my entire body is getting an electric shock and I’ll get goosebumps. Just happened right now again. Ouch. I’m about ready to go have someone just kill this nerve, whatever it is.

My therapist was actually a bit stumped by it because he said what I’m experiencing sounds like joint pain, except that in the specific spot where I have the pain there is no joint. His diagnosis was a bit more thorough than that, but the long and short of it is that I can’t run for four weeks, and when I start again I’m supposed to take it super easy. In the meantime he wrote me a prescription to go to the gym and start riding a stationary recumbent bike, do some easy breaststroke swimming, and take a yoga class. No weights, and no twisting. Just easy does it.

So I’ll be signing up today or tomorrow at the Lifetime Fitness in South Jordan. Anybody know of any special deals I can get there? I would go to 24-Hour Fitness since they’re a lot cheaper and I’m not picky, but I had such a horrible time with their cancellation policy the last time.

I’m a business owner. I run a web design and search engine marketing firm and have run it since 1999. In 2003 I tried to take some “bold” (or arguably “foolish”) steps with the business and I ended up going into debt–a LOT of debt–to cover office space and employee salaries. Although my business has been doing quite well the last few years, I still find myself with a big number I have to pay off. Even though I was mired in debt, I still somehow justified spending all sorts of money I didn’t have in order to do my half-Ironman. But soon after I discovered Dave Ramsey, the financial management talk show host, and took his plan to heart, which meant I sold my bike and any other gear I could and canceled my gym membership. My wife and I got on a strict budget that gives me a $15/month personal spending budget–hardly enough to support a triathlon habit.

Then, in December of last year I started feeling pain in my left leg which I later discovered was a disc injury. I had decided the only thing I could afford to continue doing was to run, but this injury happened just as I was about to start training for a full marathon. $500 worth of physical therapy later I still didn’t feel as good as I did in November before the injury, and I was two months behind on my marathon training with no way to catch up, which is why I ended up doing a half-marathon instead.

But it didn’t end there. Two weeks before the half-marathon I went out for a 12-mile run in the snow, or perhaps I should call it sleet. It was wet snow that melted the second it hit the ground, and within two minutes my shoes were soaking wet.  Plus I was just about up to 250 miles in these shoes, and as the Cleveland Clinic states “Running shoes lose 30 to 50% of their shock absorption ability after about 250 miles. Shock absorption is greatly reduced when running in wet shoes.” I didn’t notice anything during my run, but that evening my left foot started to hurt quite a bit. I took a day off of running, and when I went back to running a few days later it seemed fine…at least on my short runs.

I did the half-marathon and during the event my foot didn’t hurt so much as to cause me to slow down or stop, but I could feel that something wasn’t right. The same level of pain has never returned, but even after taking two weeks off of running, a two mile hike was enough to aggravate it and let me know it was still injured. So I stopped running altogether.

It has now been almost two months since the half-marathon and I’ve run a total of one mile during that time. I haven’t biked in about a year. I haven’t swam in about a year. I sometimes wonder whether stopping the biking and swimming contributed to my injuries. My physical therapist seems to think so and claims that doing a cross-training activity like biking would greatly reduce my chances for injury and would make a 100% difference in my running.

I feel like I’m ready to dive back into everything. I can make the time. I’m ready to get more scientific with my training. I’ve got the will power. What I lack is the cash. My wife and I came to an agreement that if I pay off certain amounts of debt then I get incentives. For example, if I pay off $60K in debt then I can buy myself a new bike, but it may take me a little while to pay off that much business debt. And then there are all the other expenses for food, gear, event entry fees, gym membership, etc. The way I figure it, after your up-front expenses like a bike and gear you need to have a monthly triathlon budget of $100-150 to cover the gym, food, and everything else you need on a regular basis.

I’ve had lots of ideas on how to make this work without having to come up with the cash. Maybe I can find someone who needs a website or some SEO work done on an existing site and who happens to have a nice bike we can work out a trade deal for. Maybe I can get a large percentage of my 856 Facebook friends to pitch in $5 apiece. Maybe I can do a trade deal with a bike or triathlon store. Maybe I can get a tri store to sponsor this blog if I post a little more often. But maybe I just need to be patient and focus on my business, the real money-maker, until I’ve paid my debts off. But if you’ve been bitten by the triathlon bug and then had to sit around doing nothing due to an injury or budgetary constraints, you know how frustrating waiting can be.