Hi everybody, ~3 days ago (tuesday) I started having a lot of pain in my right achilles tendon. Standing up all the way on my toes on my right foot is basically impossible due to pain. I went on an eighty minute run wednesday evening thinking the pain might subside after a little warm up but it did not, stupidly I finished the run. Since then I have curtailed my running to only ten minutes a day and it has been feeling a little better but still far from good.
However, my question concerns the cause of my pain as I have no clue what led to its onset. Prior to tuesday I have run everyday since April 27th, and at least 5 days a week since March 16th after resuming training. I had increased my weekly training time gradually from a paltry 2.5 hrs/wk to 7 hrs/wk by the end of October. All of this was easy mileage (literally running everything at 8-9:30 pace, conversational). Also every 4th week I would reduce my training by 25% in order to make sure I was recovering properly. During October I maintained the 7hr weeks which were made up of
sun: 90min
mon: 80min
tue: 30min
wed: 80min
thurs: 30min
fri: 80min
sat: 30min
At the end of October (the 25th) I ran a 5K in 17:45 (5:42-43 pace). I then proceeded to start adding some faster runs to my weeks starting on Nov 2nd. On that day I did a warm up of 15min, 4 x 1000 at 5k pace with 3:07 recovery. 2 of these repeats were faster than the others due to a stiff headwind in one direction and a tailwind in the other. The average however was exactly on pace. The rest of this run was completed at my easy pace from earlier. The total time for this day remained the same at 80min. The rest of the week remained as it had all of last month.
This past monday, Nov 9th, I ran the same workout as last week except after the repeats I ran 3.7 miles at 7:16 min/mi. The rest of the 80 min were at an easy pace. Then tuesdays run was a 30 min easy run, and sometime that night my achilles started hurting. I have no history of achilles problems and don't really know whats going on. Virtually all of my running has been on grass except for 4 runs in the last 8 months (including the race).
I'm going to just rest until the foot stops hurting (no money to go to a doctor or health insurance) but I would like to know if my training was a contributing factor to the problem so I don't make the same mistake next time.
What do you all think, did my training have anything to do with this injury?