When I flew to Houston last February, sitting in the airplane seat messed me up and eventually caused plantar fasciitis. I’m still feeling the effects of that.
I thought I had taken good enough care of myself this time to avoid any bad effects. I even made sure to stand up and move about the cabin on the flight. And things went well. I was able to run in Houston without any issues. I felt I had dodged a bullet.
When I got back to Canada, things started out okay. I had no pains when I ran. I even did a 23km run on New Year’s Day (four days after I got back) that, when mapped, looked like Santa. The next day, Wednesday, there was a quick run, and on the way home, I had a bit of pain in my back. Nothing serious though.
It was still there the next day. On the Friday I noticed it may have been connected to my left calf. So I spent that evening and the morning of the next day massaging it, and using a foam roller. I even made an appointment to see a massage therapist, although the next availability wasn’t for two weeks. My run at lunch felt great. Until I got to the halfway point. Then things got worse and worse. I was hurting a lot by the time I got back home. In fact I could barely walk.
On Sunday, I decided that my run would only be 5km. It still hurt. Things weren’t getting better.
By the next Wednesday, my run was only ten minutes, and it was painful the entire time.
I kept at that time/distance until last Friday when I saw a physiotherapist. He diagnosed me with an L5/S1 (Lumbosacral Joint) sprain with nerve root irritation. Basically my back is sprained, and my muscles were fighting to protect it. That is why my legs and butt hurt while I was running. And the impacts were going to make things worse.
In other words I have to stop running. I had gotten up to 288 days of consecutive running.
I have some exercises I can do that will help things. And I hopefully will get back to it soon enough.
I thought about trying to keep the streak going with water jogging, but that would have been too large a commitment to keep doing that every day by going to a pool some distance away. It is doable, but unpleasant enough to not make it worth it.
And, I’m okay with failure. I was hoping to get up to one year of daily running, but if it was easy, it wouldn’t be an accomplishment. In my head I thought of those people who have been doing daily runs for thirty years. But they do such short runs that it isn’t really a challenge. I’ve been doing usually about 12km. That’s not easy and each day is an accomplishment.
Besides, I’ve noticed several other injuries are starting to lessen now that I’m giving my body a break. So there is that too.