Posterior tibial tendonitis and upcoming summer training/xc

Yes you can recover from the injury. That should be your #1 priority.

You have to get healthy first. That is you first goal.

I don't think you can really set goals for the season until when you get healthy.

Injuries suck. I iced a party of my body every day for years.

I never had posterior tibial tendonitis so I can't help you with that, but if you want to stay fit with limited running - cross train your ass off.

Running should be your #1 activity, but you can maintain fitness by cross training if you have to. Cross training sucks, but if you want to be good, you'd better start doing it if you can't run.

If you were running 25 miles a week that's what roughly 30 minutes a day? What if you cross trained 45 minutes a day?

You never have to settle for a mediocre season. You may have a mediocre season but never settle for one.

If you are cross training all summer, still injured, and then XC season rolls around and you can only run a limited amount and STILL don't do as well as you wanted (you may surprise yourself), then your season will have been mediocre, but you will not have settled for one.

Settling is a decision. You control that. You don't control the outcome of your season.

Keep your head up and good luck. Injuries are a part of running. They are not fun, but you can overcome this.

First, be thankful you know what it is. That's more than half the battle.

I had vague mid-foot pain for 4 months. It looked a lot like a navicular stress fracture. Progressively got worse until I could no longer "run", just hobble. I took 2 months off, had it flare up, and only recently found out it was tendon related through imaging. Either ATT or PTT or both.

For the first month, the only thing that didn't bother the foot was swimming. It hurt to push off the wall with the bad foot.

So second point is take more time off. 1 week isn't enough. If you keep testing it, you'll be out longer. Do the cross-training/pool running for weeks.

Third point is listen to Wejo. Great post by him.

You'll be back and the summer is lots of time to recover IF you don't test the foot like you might be doing now.

Karthnath wrote:

I'm a freshman athlete that has been suffering from posterior tibial tendonitis that has ruined my track season. It comes on and off. At first I took a week off and was able to start running a little. (3 miles a week). Over the weeks I was slowly able to build up. I was going to reach 10 miles a week this week, but the injury flared up in my left ankle. I'm now going to see a sports doc on friday. I've tried stretching, eccentrics, and massage but it doesn't seem to allow me to run more than 6 miles a week. (during xc I built up to 25 miles a week).

Investigate Active Release Technique. That's what finally seemed to kick my PTT. For what it's worth, time off didn't help me; I took 4 months off and it came back. Keep doing the stretching and the eccentrics, but look into ART.

Stretching, strength training and eccentrics just made it worse for me. What worked was heavy icing of the tendon and heavy massage of the muscle.

It's VERY difficult to properly massage the post tib. It lies below the gastrocnemius and soleus and goes all the way up to the knee. You have to dig in between the two bellies of the gastroc, push through the soleus and then bend your fingers around. And that's just one of the spots. It's possible to do it yourself but it's better, at least in the beginning, to see a qualified sports massage therapist or similar.