“Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow, it empties today of its strength.”
― Corrie ten Boom

Journal: 2 Mar 2016

I’ve been struggling with injury after injury since coming back from exchange in Arizona 2 months ago.

First an ITB strain due to ramping up my staurday long run workout by 1 mile every week, which eventually progressed from 7 to 22+ miles. I guess that was foolish on my part but now I know better – follow the 10% rule! Only increase your weekly mileage by at most 10% every week and no training session should last beyond 3 hours (there really isn’t any point in that unless its a race which isn’t training.)

That strain forced me to stop running altogether and may contributed to more injuries. Now I’m suffering from a bad case of plantar fasciitis and peroneal tendinitis on my right feet and a strain on my left vastus medialis (possibly from bad squatting technique…).

As with most things, I don’t believe there is a single factor I can blame but rather multiple factors that contribute to the cause of a phenomenon.

Linda, my go-to physiotherapist was saying it could be the cold weather which helped me control my arthritic auto-immune disease – Ankylosing Spondylitis. Patients with systemic arthritis often report feeling better when they move to a colder climate. Perhaps this was why I could participate in so many Spartan races and even run a half-marathon every Saturday?

Or it could be because I was feeling the full benefits of the 3 jabs I had every month from June last year which almost helped ‘cure’ my condition. There is no cure for Ankylosing Spondylitis but those jabs were like some miracle. Its now 6 months since my last jab.

Whatever it is, the foot pain has been most debilitating for the past 8 weeks. Its difficult to let it rest completely because that would mean confining myself to the house and a computer chair to de-load it. Furthermore, I have a varsity canoeing competition coming up in 17 days which makes it even more frustrating not being able to train.

I guess I should really let it heal up completely before walking around too much again. Thus I have begun confining myself to the house since yesterday, using crutches or the computer chair to move around and only standing when I have to.

Other measures include icing the foot every hour for 20 minutes using a velcro ankle guard for added compression, frequent stretching, going down to the park twice a day to earth/ground (which surprisingly, seems to bring me significant relieve and lessen the inflammation. More on that in a later post) and a whole lot of mobilization for the muscles in the foot. This is done through ankle circles and toe wiggling and grasping as often as I can afford it throughout the day.

I pray and sincerely hope this wont take too long to heal…