Achilles 1, Running 0

OK, so this achilles thing has me completely messed up and it is now very obvious to me that "treating it gently" like I have been for the last 3 weeks is not doing any good.

Ran Thursday lunchtime and did a 3 miles at 7:30 pace as part of a 7 miler. During the run the heel felt OK, but that may have been because I was too preoccupied with not passing out due to the 99 degree weather (way too hot for fast miles, my heartrate hit 179!). Friday morning it was stiffer than ever, and bugged me most of the day even with ibuprofen. It's still bad this morning.

After a bunch more online research I have come to the realisation that if I don't make a drastic change this is just going to get worse and worse until I end up needing tendon surgery and then I can say goodbye to running until 2008.

So I am going to completely stop running until at least July, dose up on ibuprofen (3x600mg/day for 7 days), get some orthotic heel inserts, wear shoes with a heel all the time (to relax the tendon), stretch at least twice a day, heat before stretching, ice afterwards, and start doing some "Swedish eccentric calf exercises", which sound more exotic than they are..... http://www.pponline.co.uk/encyc/0031.htm

I can hopefully keep some basic level of fitness with a bit of pool running, if that doesn't strain the achilles at all, but I'm not going back on the bike since that didn't help at all and also made my knees worse!

Starting no earlier than July 1st, I'm going to spend a couple weeks easing back to 25 miles/week and only then start doing anything other than easy, flat short runs.

If that all goes well, I'll probably at least be able to run the Los Gatos half as an easy long run at around 8:30 pace. A far cry from my goal of 6:52 required to go sub 90 minutes.

I'm really pissed about this but realistically it is the only way that I'm going to get through this and still be able to train and compete effectively at CIM in early December, and even with this approach I'll be going into a 20 week training program having run an average of 15 MPW for the last 7 weeks, vs starting from a solid base of 50-60 as I had hoped. Plus if I don't stop eating/drinking so much I'll be 10 pounds overweight.

Of course, this is if things go well. If it doesn't, and I can't start training properly in the second half of July, then I'm not going to be ready for CIM, which means I'd need to start lining things up for the London Marathon in April '08.

So, if you see me running at all before July 1st, or doing anything other than easy miles before July 15th, please yell at me and call me stupid.