Calf pain/strain. Potential world-ending disaster. All hands on deck for this one pretty plu-eeeze

Polar

Barefooters
Dec 8, 2011
18
0
1
Apologies for the long story below but I feel I need to give full detail to solve a potential personal catastrophic disaster from occuring. Full b/foot for 5 months now after a very fast transition of about 3 months (I know, I know). All went well, no serious issues. I have done 2 full marathons full barefoot with no issues. Doing about 70 - 80 kays a week. My left leg has always been the weaker and prior to barefooting I suffered from a depressing bout of runners knee. Left hammy is also always a bit tender. Sports doctor has also previously advised me that I have significant scarring of both calfs (calves?) due to the high number of ultras I have run. He also said it is common amongst ultra runners. I have been doing some strengthening exercises but, like most people here, not enough I guess.

Fast forward to 2 weeks ago. Did a third full marathon and this one was unusual in that it was a roller coaster course. I ran a quickish first half. At the 30 kay mark there is a very steep downhill. I have not done much training on downhills under the misguided impression that "who needs to train to run downhill FFS?". So 1 klick down the downhill (heelstriking like mad) my left calf suddenly got very sore. I almost sh*t myself that I had torn it but some rubbing and walking got me going again. I was 9 klicks from the finish so continued at a slower pace without "significant" pain (sidenote: I have a very high pain threshold). Finished, showered, drank copious beer, sounded off about the benefits of b/foot running to anyone who would listen, went home. Took 2 days off then went for a slow 5 kay.

No problems for first 4 kays then left calf again suddenly sore so I walked to the finish. Mr Cautious. Took 5 days off (about the maximum I am capable of before becoming socially undesirable to friends and family) then went for a 10 kay. 4 kays in, same problem. I was not going to call off the run due to weakness of body so rubbed and continued. Did about a further 3 kays on the beach and the pain was not "significant". I could run albeit with some discomfort. The next day I walked with pain and the left calf seemed swollen. If I squeezed it the muscle was sore. Took a week or so off and started icing it once to twice per day.

Yesterday I did a slow 5 kay on the flat. 3 kays in and bang, left calf, same thing again. I swore blue murder and physically hit my calf repeatedly with my fist whilst howling at the heavens. Kept going and ran with some pain. I resolved to simply ignore my left calf. If it did not want to work with the rest of my body then I was quite prepared to exclude it from "our" team. 4 kays in and BANG went the right calf!



WTF? I have never had any problems with my right calf. NEVER I say. Never Never Never. N E H V H E R! Hobbled to finish. Became tearful. Drank beer. Searched internet.

Uninformed and probably fatally wrong self diagnosis: The pain is specific, not widespread. If you stand on your toe and your calf bulges attractivly, the pain is located at the bottom of the bulge in the middle. Not a calf tear as I can point my toe with zero pain, can walk on my tip toes without much pain and could feasibly run some sort of distance with moderate pain. Can squeeze my Achilles without pain. No TOFP at all. Also why all of a sardine the right calf on an easy flat run? Surely you can't tear an uninjured, strong calf during a slow flat 5 kay? I suspect the long downhill stretch of the marathon put significant and unusual strain on both calfs as I had not trained on the downhill. Post marathon, my calfs were scarred and shortened. The resting actually led to further shortening/atrophy and now any running leads to them being forced to strecth out again like unused msucles. The scarring obviously means it is even harder for them to stretch hence the pain.

Treatment: icing, massaging and targeted stretches. Shorter strides, more bent knees, no hills for now.

Please don't tell me to stop running completly. It is not an option. You may as well tell me to stop breathing for 1 week. I have 2 x ultras on the horizon and them dates aint gonna change because of my crisis.



Any and all comments, advice, harsh criticism, recrimination or sympathy welcome. Help. Me. Please.
 
heel drops to strengthen your

heel drops to strengthen your calfs and work on strengthening your weak leg. your body is telling you it needs to rest and slow down. listen to it or it will take you down for good. are you truly bf? don't heel strike downhill. there are threads about how to run downhill all over here.
 
your right calf is now

your right calf is now rebelling because your body is compensating for the weakness in the left, over taxing the right side. I hesitate to offer any advice, since you seem to only want to hear how to run through it. That is not my advice.

if it were me, I'd think about my true goals. Are they to finish races in the near future or to continue to run healthy for the long haul? Pushing through pain isn't always the best approach, since your body is trying to tell you something. It sounds, from your description of the pain point, that the soleus or upper achilles are your problem. Those are common pain areas for transitioning barefoot runners. I had a fair bit of struggle with that area early in my transition and it was form-related; I was staying up on the balls of my feet and not letting my heel come down and overworking my calves/achilles. Once I relaxed a bit it got better.



Google Ken Bob's downhill running technique; it really helped me with down hills.
 
Thanks Lomad and migangelo. 

Thanks Lomad and migangelo. Not what I want to hear but it running through it, as you say, will probably be a downward spiral. I am also thinking it could be soleus related. Looks like my past has finally caught up to me.
 
Polar, you sound like a much

Polar, you sound like a much more accomplished runner than I may ever be, so take this with a grain of salt, I am just speaking of my own experience that sounds eerily similar to yours. When I was about 3 or 4 months into my transition to barefoot running I developed a pain in my left calf much like you did. Came on very suddenly, I would rest for a week, icing and stretching like you are, and then try running to only have this happen again on the very next run. I ended up out for two months because I kept trying to push through it like you are.

For me, I know this little tip sounds counter productive but it got me running again in a week, I stopped any and all stretching. Stretching tears muscles fibers and when stretching an injury it makes it worse, not better. Now, I went overboard on this and after the injury healed I figured stretching was bad and I wouldn't do it anymore, not static stretching anyhow. Fast forward to now and I am finally recovering from my first ever bout of both Plantar Fasciitis and Achilles Tendonitis, caused from, you guessed it, not stretching.

I would say don't stretch while you are resting your legs but make sure you go back to your stretching once, and only once, your injury is healed. I just stretched for the first time in 6-7 months last Thursday or Friday. Was amazing, the very next day I had zero pain. I did the stretching again that second day and I found I was able to reach almost 6 inches farther than the day before. So my advice is to not stretch the injury, but once it's healed get back to stretching so you don't end up wound tight like I am now, PF and AT suck badly. I would also advise more yoga type stretches than a lot of the static stretches. Good luck and hope you heal fast.
 
Yeah, I had a thread just a

Yeah, I had a thread just a few weeks ago about sudden calf pain. I now make a practice of walking a quarter mile, then running a slow easy quarter mile, then picking up the pace. It makes all the difference for me. If I run at my warmed-up clip right out of the door I will get about two miles in then pull-up with seriously knotty pain in my right calf.

This also seems to hit me more if I'm switching between minimal shoes and bare feet. But who knows.
 
UPDATE for those

UPDATE for those interested.



Took 5 days off, complete rest plus icing 3 - 4 times per day. Five days was the max I could handle. Went for slow, easy run. Literally one minute into run and both calves were balls of pain and back to square one. I walked/ran 5 kays to completion. Could hardly walk after run. The next morning was agony - especially going down steps. From my perspective, the rest option is not working. I still feel I need to activley stretch out my soleous/calves but under "warmed up" conditions as cold static streches will just further inflame the muscles.

The next day I did a 5 kay walk at lunch. In shoes (gasp). I feel the marshmallows will lift my heels such that the calves get to slowly stretch out as they warmed. It seemed to work as after the walk, my calfs felt sore (2/10) but warmed up and OK. Did a 5 kay slow run that evening after a 5 minute walk warmup. Left calf OK (2/10 pain). Right calf prone to odd knotting/cramping type pain but I just walked it out then continued a slow run; in shoes. Today, my calves feel much better. I can actually walk normally and my perception is that they are slowly on the mend. Will continue the above regimen and slowly ramp up the mileage. Will ditch the shoes after 1 week of no pain.



It seems all my optimism about how I transitioned from full shoe to full barefoot in 3 months may have been a bit premature. The old calves decided to wait for the right time to come out the bush and jumped me. Feels good to be running again though. Don't ever take the ability to be able to run for granted. you only appreciate the gift when you are sidelined by an injury.



Sidenote: running in shoes really sucks. Jolting, bumpy, rough and feels unnatural.
 
Polar:I am/have been going

Polar:

I am/have been going through a very similar stretch with calf pain. It comes back, then goes away, then comes back... right now it's gone away.

The last time around - last week - when my calves (particularly the right one) were too knotty to run, I limited myself to barefoot running in place, in the house. This gave me the ability to control how hard/fast I moved, and for how long. If you run-in-place, you definitely work out your calf muscles, but in a controlled manner. For the last few days, I started adding 100ups.

Doing the 100ups sort of focused me on an aspect of running form that I hadn't considered: knee movement. So last night I (unintentionally) did four miles, feeling easy, fresh, and fast. I focused on driving/lifting my knees forward (the 100ups), becuase it felt so good. What I did not focus on was my feet. But I realized after a while that my foot strike and foot lift were effortless, because as I drove my knee forward, my foot came off the ground heel-mid-toe with no push off - I was "pulling" it off the ground. And it was landing under my hip, and then springing forward again as I lifted my knee... and I was completely calf/achilles/foot pain free.

I don't know if it will last - it's been so on-again/off-again. But it felt like a break-through for me. It could just be the affect of being aware of a different aspect of my stride, but I'm going to keep focusing on knee lift for a while.

And I'm sure I'm still doing it wrong, but it's faster and softer, so I don't know how wrong it could be.
 
Barefoot Gburg I am fairly

Barefoot Gburg I am fairly convinced we have the same thing. Your post gives me hope. We gonna beat this thing. I'll keep updating as I progress. I have resolved to keep pushing and get back to full strength. BTW: I noticed skipping along the road (you know, like kids do) ups the heart rate tremendously and does not hurt the calves when they are in their 'knotty" phase. Just sayin. looks crazy though.
 
HiPolar,I responded to

HiPolar,

I responded to BFGburg's old Calf Pain post saying that I went through the calf pain crisis at about the same time in my BF running career. I think it might be a fairly common phase of ramping up our bodies' shock absorption systems.

I didn't see you mention it, but if you're not doing the deep massage thing on your calves, you would do well to try it. There are videos I've seen posted showing how to use rollers to do wonderful knot release stuff. You can find all sorts of objects to work on yourself with, including water bottles (warm water feels quite good), tennis balls, or just your fist.

I hope I'm right in thinking that you haven't actually ripped your calf muscles beyond recall, but are in transition, and can get to the other side if you don't try too bloody hard to force your body to run before it's ready.

Good luck!

BiPolar!
 
Thanks JosephTree. 

Thanks JosephTree. Definately not torn/ripped as I would be in far more pain. I can also walk on my tip toes, etc without pain. I'll definately use some of those techniques - warm water in a bottle sounds good. One method I use when I am sitting in boring meetings is to put my calf on top of my opposite leg's knee then rub/massage it using my kneecap.



tah
 
Hi Polar,I go along with

Hi Polar,

I go along with what the others say in that it is common to get calf knots in the first few months. Now, corrent me if I'm reading this wrong but you said you did some barefoot marathons?

I don't know how you managed that distance if you had only got rid of the shoes about 4 months earlier. My feet would have never stood up to that kind of distance. If you ran it in minimalist shoes that doesn't give the calf muscles enough time to adapt. I pulled a calf muscle running in Vibrams in the early days, if I'd have gone on that particular run barefoot I know 3 things:

1. My form would have been better.

2. I could have only managed half the distance and

3. I probably would have not got the calf pain in the first place.

Resting it for a week won't work, I would say it is going to be a minimum of 3 weeks and after that doing very short runs and practice the form rather than the distance.

Rollers are very good. I bought one of the Thera Rollers around 5 months ago and use it all the time.

Good luck.



Neil
 
***Last update***For like,

***Last update***

For like, posterity or history; in case some poor dood suffers the same fate in the future and comes across this very post whilst doing a sweaty and desperate internet search for help.

I am back to full barefoot, 10 kays per day, minimal and dissapearing pain (by that I mean I am better and better every day even though mileage is being increased). Lessons learnt:
  • Super fast transitions with no problems are not.
  • Your body holds surprises.
  • Complete rest is not always the solution.
  • Pushing through an inujury is not always the solution.
  • So what was the solution? Still not really sure but experiment - be courageous.
  • Being sidelined with an injury may seem world ending but your body is amazing and will heal itself if you let it.
  • Unicorns pooh rainbows.
  • The calf is a funny thing.
Good luck! Thank you and goodnight.
 
Unicorns pooh rainbows.So do

Unicorns pooh rainbows.

So do I. And diamonds too. ;-)
 
Diamonds? Sounds extremely

Diamonds? Sounds extremely painful.
 
Liquid diamond.  Ever hear of

Liquid diamond. Ever hear of it?