Eccentric

I tried a 10 minute/2k test run on Sunday and it didn’t really seem to affect my ankle at all, so I then did 5k on Monday, which I also seemed get away with. Tuesday I did a 5k progression (i.e. gradually speeding up, every KM faster than the previous), and it was fine until I came home and did 20 calf raises. It started to hurt after about 15 and then seemed quite achy for a while, but it was fine on the dog walk two hours later. Wednesday was an easy 30 minutes, which was also fine. Thursday I took a rest day just due to scheduling, so of course on Friday morning it was hurting more than it has done recently. Doing a quick calf stretch took away 90% of the pain but it’s still worse than it has been.

So anyway I’ve got a physio appointment for Tuesday.

I have been focusing on eccentric exerises for it, which per my non medical understanding means loading the tendon while it’s being stretched. Usually to load a tendon you contract the muscle, but apparently going the other way encourages ‘remodelling’. I think really it means you’re damaging the tendon in such a way that the body wants to heal it, (hopefully) without the problems it had built up before. Eccentric exercises seem to be the most effective for tendonitis from what I can tell. But we’ll see what Mr Physio says. He’s the same one I saw a few years ago and seemed to know what he was talking about.

Unrelated to the above, here is Monty in a cafe at the weekend. I know, he’s really cute. Let me know if you want to send him a Valentine’s day card.