Hoping

I met this guy on my walk today

The heel I hurt on yesterday's long run remains painful, but has improved.  By this afternoon, I was able to walk 5km without serious discomfort.  I'm hoping that by tomorrow it will have improved sufficiently to complete my usual Tuesday morning run with a group from Trotters.  It will be sore, but if I can get through without making it worse, some optimism will return.

However, I'm also trying to mentally prepare myself for a worse case scenario.  It's always important to know what your options are, and I have played out several in my mind.  One thing I don't want to do is to soldier on despite worsening pain.  All serious runners know the temptation when fit to keep on running, regardless of an injury, for fear of losing their fitness and wasting all the time and effort they have invested to get to that stage.

Thirty or forty years ago, I would have visited a doctor to get anti-inflammatories prescribed so that I could continue to train and race.  In retrospect, I cannot remember a time when this proved to be a sustainable solution.  Either I ended up needing to have more time off running, or in the more serious cases, surgery.  These days, I don't feel any temptation to resort to anti-inflammatories.  Better not to mask the pain so that you really know the scale of the injury.  If the injury seems bad tomorrow, I will be scaling back my training.