Monday, October 27, 2008 [0M]

I finally went back to Dr Oloff's office today to find out my MRI results. The MRI ruled out the stress fracture but that's all I got as far as good news. The bad news is that the pain is related to the chronic Achilles issue, which was a bit surprising since the pain was not at the usual spot but more on the inside of my foot. The tendon was shown to be irritated, though, and is starting to detach at the point where it meets the heel. There's a lot of fluid accumulated on the sides of the tendon, which is why my foot has been hurting. For the short term, there's not much I can do but give this some more rest. For the long term I have two options: 

1. Do nothing. I could start running again once  I feel better and keep doing whatever I have been doing all along. Whenever the Achilles starts acting up again I err on the conservative side, start the I-squared treatment and hope things get better without having to cut back on my training much. 

2. Have surgery to fix the problem for good. 

Things would be a lot easier if I wasn't running competitively, since I wouldn't really have any reason to go through surgery. I would go about living my life and not worry about this, even if the Achilles was acting up every now and then. If I want to keep running, though, and especially if I want to make another attempt to prepare for a marathon, I think I need a more permanent solution. It's frustrating when I'm doing some serious training, running peak mileage and good workouts, to have everything go to waste because of this one injury. The source of the problem is that I have an elongated heel bone, which irritates the Achilles tendon, and there's basically no other way to fix the defect without surgery. My main concern is that this kind of surgery will require a long recovery period. Few weeks on crutches, lots of time in physical therapy and about 4-6 months before I can get back to running. It's up to me to decide if I want to go through surgery but it's not an easy decision to make. If I were to have surgery it wouldn't until some time in mid-January so I still have some time to think about it. Oh, nothing as far as training today. I was back home early in the afternoon after my appointment and stayed home, completely unmotivated to do anything.