50 year old female, training for first marathon.
Training has been great -- nailed the 20 miler and subsequent pre-taper 17 miler, and based on that I was targeting a 4:15 finish ... until last Saturday when my ankle/foot blew up on me out of the blue on a 10 mile run.
Niggling pain on inside of left ankle down to the heel ... became heel pain shooting across my foot ... eventually became pain on the other side of my ankle and outside of my foot, I'm sure from compensating in my gain. My whole ankle just felt locked up ... not painful, just not fluidly mobile.
Rested Sun-Weds; tried it out last night because it had been pain free to walk on from Tues on. Nope ... pain started as soon as I started running. Gave it a mile ... it never settled down. Stopped.
I've been calf stretching, icing, rolling, night-socking. Saw my chiro who worked on it some on Monday; at that time he said he thought it should be fine by start day.
Had a massage already scheduled for today and she spent most of the time on my foot/calf/ankle ... something did seem to "shift" and now the ankle feels looser; still have the heel pain from last night.
It is crushing me to think about not running ... but if I can't run a stinking mile without pain, how am I going to manage the whole distance?
My running group coach says to just chill and rest/ice/stretch/roll/etc. it from now until the marathon because there are no fitness gains to be made at this point, so that's what I'm doing.
But how do I decide whether to start and try it or just not try and maybe choose one a month or two later? I don't *want* to do that because the rest of me is ready now, and with a hurt foot, how the heck am I going to keep my training up to support a Nov or Dec marathon? And there is no guarantee the foot will be better by then either.....
Thoughts?