Since none of the medical professionals I have visited have been able to shed any light on my issue, maybe someone here has experienced the same problem.
I am having pain on the lateral side of my right foot, specifically on the underside. It is localized, i.e. it doesn’t hurt in my ball or heel at all. The pain doesn’t exist at all when there is no pressure on the spot. I can press, massage, rub, all I want with my hands, no pain. I can stand on the ball of my foot, or on the heel, no pain. The pain comes on dull and slow when I stand flat footed, run with a heel or mid-foot strike, or walk normally. It takes about a minute, when doing any of those pain inducing activities, from no pain until I must stop doing the activity.
Most recently I noticed this on my right foot, about 8 miles into a 20 mile LSD run, on Monday (25 April). Not wanting to cause further injury I cut the run at 10. It bothered me as explained above for the last two miles, and the entire rest of that day. The next morning the pain wasn’t too bad, though I was noticeably compensating when walking. By the end of the day after, walking was pretty much back to normal. I saw a PT who did some mobilization on my cuboid, taped it, and then I continued on. Swim workout that Tuesday evening, no problems. Bike on Wednesday, no problems, walking perfectly again. Thursday bike and swim, no problems. Did speedwork running on Friday, but kept it short (2x1 mile) due to a half-marathon I was running today (Sunday).
That takes us to the half-marathon today. I started out a bit too fast for the first mile, over compensated my speed on the second mile, and by the third was having some problems with both of my tibialis anterior muscles (just thought I’d mention it incase it may be related). I finally settled into a comfortable pace and my shin pain died down. Then at about mile five my right foot blew up again. Stubbornly I ran through it for two miles, and then angrily adopted a fore-foot strike for another two. Since this was supposed to be a fun training run with me and a couple thousand of my friends, and I was having no fun, I started walking at about mile nine and took a shortcut back to the start. And that is where I am right now, about to apply RICE and appeal to all of you for a little enlightenment.
A little history that may help. I had this same issue with my left foot at the beginning of December, happened suddenly on a fairly short effort on a treadmill (about 4 miles or so). That time it was the day before a half-marathon, and since this was the first time it had happened, I figured it would go away when I woke up. When it hadn’t, I figured it would go away when I warmed up on the run. And when it didn’t I dropped out of the run. Since this was my last real event of the season, I took off running entirely for a little over a month, and haven’t had any issues with that foot since.
When this happened in December I was wearing a heavy stability shoe (recommended by a store in Colorado Springs, based on my gait) with factory insoles. In December I got custom orthodics to help me out with some ITBS issues, and have been running on them since picking my training back up at the end of February (about 200 injury free miles before Monday). Looking for any sort of answer I went to a new shop in Seattle, and they advised that I should be wearing a neutral shoe. I do have high arches, BTW. So I bought myself a performance neutral shoe, Brooks Launch, and wore those during the half-marathon today.
I hope that covers just about any information that may be useful. If anything else can help anyone out there to help me identify and fix my problem, let me know.
Thank you.
