The importance of being idle

I run an ever increasing amount of mileage, divided into 3 weeknight chunks, and a longer run on Sundays. I cycle to work pretty much everyday, and jam in some cross training whenever I find a spare evening. Ironically, the more you do, the harder it is to say hey, take a day off, let your body recover. Seriously, i know it sounds insane but it really is tough. However, sometimes you've just got to do it.

I ran just over 12 miles on Sunday, and 31 miles in total that week, through some of the worst conditions since training started. Over the last week or so, we have had more snow than I've seen in a long time, and it's made running a little difficult to say the least. But I've managed to struggle through with no real problems, until now....

I woke up yesterday with horrible shooting pain down the outside of the bottom of my left foot. My first reaction was hooray, it's not my knees, and my second was to get on google and commence with some self-diagnosis. I have it narrowed down to pereoneal insertional tendonitis - it's ok when I don't put weight on it, but walking is super painful, and running is out of the question. Internet wisdom prescribes the usual rest-ice-elevation-pray it gets better cycle, which is what I've spent most of today doing, in addition to some hardcore anti-inflammatories. It's caused by overloading of a tendon that runs down the outside of the leg and into the foot, and was probably triggered when I fell over on some ice on Sunday, combined with running on uneven ground. I'm going to stay off it as much as possible, with no running for as long as it takes to feel better - tendons are notoriously hard to heal due to their minimal blood supply - I'm hoping to be back at it by the weekend, fingers crossed.

UPDATE: still no improvement, so I'm booked in with the foot doctor Friday to see what I can do to speed this up. In the meantime I've been trying to keep up some kind of fitness by terrorising the UEA pool through a combination of  high speed frustration laps whilst wearing a badly fitting borrowed bikini. It's not pretty but it makes me feel less useless.