An interesting new development in the progress of my wife's exercise journey. She has just been diagnosed with her first injury. If she was a member of the scouts I think she would probably have just earned a badge. She must be a real triathlete now.
In terms of injury it is, unfortunately, a painfully predictable one, although it is actually an injury I haven't had myself, which in itself is an achievement.
Her injury is a stress reaction in one of her metatarsals. I didn't even know what a stress reaction was until she was diagnosed with it. Turns out that a stress reaction is the step before you get a full blown stress fracture. The fact that this didn't progress to a full on stress fracture is a bit of a win really, although I am not entirely sure my wife is seeing it that way at the moment.
The injury came to light during one of her runs a few weeks ago. There was no big 'sudden stabbing pain' type of moment, but rather she got to the end of her run and noticed it was sore. At the same time the pain wasn't a gradual build as stress fractures often are.
When she reported pain in her foot, it had be a bit baffled and a bit concerned. I have hurt most of my body parts, but my feet have been fairly injury free. As a result of my lack of injury I am not that familiar with my foot's make up. However, as far as I knew there wasn't really a muscle to hurt in the bit of foot my wife was pointing to. That indicated that the injury was joint or bone related and my initial concern was that it was indeed a bone issue.
After seeing Marc See the super physio at Front Runners the diagnosis came back as swelling in some of her toe joints. A bit of massage, some needles and some icing ensued and so did the improvements. However, while her pain levels were improving, they weren't improving very quickly and the injury was very susceptible to aggravation. This lack of improvements led to another physio visit on Monday and a revised diagnosis with an associated revision of the rehab and recovery plan.
As a result of the revised diagnosis, my wife is now having her first bout of a very special athlete experience, the frustration you feel when you can't do the exercise that you would like to. I wonder if there is another badge for that. I have to say she isn't enjoying the experience very much. However, on the bright side, having a more concrete diagnosis means that we can now plan her medium term program to take the injury into account, rather than doing it on a day by day basis.
As fun as this injury is, as I mentioned above it is also painfully predictable. The reason for its predictability is because it is a form of overuse injuries, which are probably one of the most common types of injury that new runners suffer from. When people start running they often fall into the trap of running too far, too quickly and as a result they push their body further than it is ready for. Pushing the body in running before it has had the time to build up the strength to run far or fast properly can lead to bad form and all types of harm.
The frustrating thing about my wife's injury (other than its very existence) is that I am very aware of the danger of pushing too far, too quickly with running and so I thought I was taking all the right steps to avoid it. We reviewed the program together every week and we were very careful to make sure the progression of the running was gradual. In the end I guess it wasn't gradual enough, which is actually a good lesson to have learnt, however, I suspect my wife would prefer me to learn my lessons some other way in future.
There is always more to know.
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