Foot Fun Part 2

I wasn't planning on being injured this winter. I was conservative with my mileage, I was keeping up with my core workouts, and I wasn't doing too many intense workouts, but, alas, injured I became. 

In my previous post I wrote about an ankle injury that cleared up with treatment. At the same time, I was also dealing with an injury on the other foot. I saw Dr. Voight, the fantastic sports medicine doctor, who along with diagnosing my ankle injury, also diagnosed my foot with sesamoiditis. She prescribed a pad to relieve the pressure, and after a few months, the pain cleared up.

By summer I was healthy and running well, and was feeling good going into the winter.

The winter had been going well. I'd competed several long runs of 15+ miles, and I'd been running pain-free on all my runs besides some little twinges in the foot that was injured last season.

Then, in February at our local weekly 5K, I ran hard on a course covered in snow. After the race, I was planning on putting in a few more miles, but my foot started hurting enough that I decided to bag the run.

I stopped running on icy and snowy surfaces and went to all track and treadmill running, and things seemed to be going fine. Then my foot started to hurt on the track, so I went to exclusively treadmill running. For a couple weeks I was running on the treadmill without any pain, but then eight miles into what I wanted to be a longer run, my foot acted up again, and this time it was the most painful it'd been since that 5K.

I tried again the next day, and my foot acted up after only twenty minutes.

After taking a couple weeks off from running without my foot feeling any better (in fact, it started to feel worse, popping and hurting when I walked in the house barefoot, which led me to wear shoes indoors), I made an appointment with another another doctor. Dr. Voight wasn’t available, so I tried someone else who worked with athletes.

After a cortisone shot for what the doctor thought might be a neuroma, my foot still wasn’t any better—if anything it was worse. 

So, I made an appointment with Dr. Voight. I had to wait a little longer to see her, but I figured it’d be my best shot.

Dr. Voight decided an MRI would be best as she couldn’t figure out what was going on with an exam. 

After the MRI I saw her again, and she had an idea as to what ails my foot. “It looks like some inflammation on the second metatarsal,” she said.

So, she prescribed metatarsal pads, naproxen, toe spacers, and no running for two weeks.

It turned out that these things didn’t help either. At that point, it had been over six weeks since I’d run at all, and the painful popping sensation in my foot continued to bother me.

To be continued...