I am experiencing recurring pain in one calf after biking & running, and am looking for advice.
The pain is fairly localized (to perhaps the size of a small egg), in the upper part of my calf, a little below the back of the knee, in the “core” of the muscle. (Sorry my anatomy isn’t good enough for a better description.) Could be muscular or a deep tendon.
It shows up mostly after I bike. It’s only my right (dominant) calf. For a while I was convinced it was telling me about a left-right asymmetry or non-circular pedal stroke, so I have been trying to work on those.
It also flares up after running sometimes, particularly if it’s slightly sore when I start the run. A recent clue came from a training partner telling me not to “run like a duck”. My foot placement seems nice and straight when I’m fresh, but when I get tired it seems that I have a tendency to splay my feet out to the sides a little bit. Analyzing this on my last long run, I learned that trying to keep my feet arrow-straight once I have started to “run like a duck” causes some tension in my calf. This is especially noticeable when I’m walking post-run, for some reason. So now I’m wondering if my duck-run is a response to tight calves, or if the pain is a side effect of an odd gait.
It doesn’t feel like “good pain”, so I’m sure I need to fix it, not ignore it. Icing and stretching seem to help some. Short amounts of rest do not – after a half-week rest, it returned worse than ever after a short sprint tri (my first!). There have been no dramatic increases in volume – I have scrupulously avoided increasing by more than 10% per week.
I’m pretty new to this, but from what I have read I haven’t been able to identify this as any of the more common running/biking injuries. Does it sound familiar to anyone?
Any guesses whether this is coming from my pedal stroke or my running gait or inflexibility or strength imbalance or what? Should I rest it, stretch it, do gym work, work on pedal stroke, work on running gait, or what?
Thanks for any advice,
-Steve Stuart
I had pain very similar to what you were describing about 3-4 months ago. It was at the top of the calf muscle, just below the crease in my knee. It was the size of about a quarter. I went to my orthopedist and he took x-rays, etc and determined that most likely, it was a Baker’s Cyst. He said the pain was most likely due to the Cyst bursting. He said the pain would most likely go away in a few weeks.
He was right. The pain went away slowly over the next 2-3 weeks. I kept up with the cycling but didn’t run very far on it, because that was when the pain was the worst.
Do a search online for a Baker’s Cyst and see if you have the symptoms. Good news is that once they burst,the pain stops. I haven’t had any pain since.
Good luck.
Steve, I have that kind of pain in my calves occasionally, and it is probably more likely from running than cycling. When I develop ‘knots’ in my calves which are basically just isolated lumps of tightened up muscle from overuse or stress on a particular area, I am typically able to get them to go away by a combination of stretching the muscle, ice massage (ice frozen Dixie cup in freezer; peel off cup like a popsicle, and rub on affected area for 10 minutes) to keep inflammation down, steady course of Ibuprofen or Aleve for several days until the inflammation goes down, and a good massage therapist can really help kneed out muscle knots. Hope that helps, and good luck getting rid of them. Not as much fun to run when it feels like someone has frogged you in the calf!
I second the massage therapy recommendation. My massage guy call this “egg” in the calf the “runner’s ball.” A few days off from running and a 30 minute leg massage usually does the trick.
Thanks, Sparky and tri_antelope, for the massage recommendation. I have one scheduled for this afternoon. Hopefully it’ll help. I hadn’t gone that route becuase it occasionally feels so inflamed (rather than knotted) that I wasn’t sure it was something that could be massaged away. But it’s worth a shot. Uptown: after reading symptoms I don’t think it’s a Baker’s cyst because I don’t have a noticeable fluid-filled cyst. But thanks for the lead.
Steve Stuart