A-Kills-Me Tendon and a Peroneal Mess

The best laid plans often go awry, and I still don’t understand why it needs to be that way. My husband always advised that we should prepare a good plan, and work the plan. If you have a good plan and stick with it, according to his playbook, success is inevitable. My training plans could surely challenge that theory, or perhaps I’ve yet to establish a good plan?

Twenty-eighteen appeared to be the first year we would not be remodeling a house, and I was going to put the extra stress-free time to good use. I spent several weeks researching the most effective way to design a full-year training program, and documented my plan on this blog. Enter the awry part.

It was late February when I noticed my calves were tight. I even mentioned it to my husband. But life gets busy. We forget to stretch. Muscles get tighter, and they take other major body parts down with them.

My Achilles’ tendon got all out of sorts, and finally I started stretching. Except this irritable tendon became inflamed by the sudden attention and swole in disgust.

Not one to give in to a rant from Achilles, I ran through the pain until it settled down and left me alone. It’s a known fact we will almost always lose a battle with overuse injuries. ”Overuse” is not the true source of our ailments anyway. Training error accounts for most of our problems, which makes the question from the first paragraph all the more apt.

Of course, I continued to train through the pain. If I could just survive a minute or two of being uncomfortable, I could run for as long as I wanted pain free.  But the damage was still being done, and it should come as no surprise that eventually things went from bad to worse.

Achilles’ tendon issues will usually diminish when tight calves are resolved. Even if the tendon settles down, it will flare up again if running is resumed when the calf muscles remain tight. The key is to stretch the calves without over-stretching the Achilles.

In my case, the peroneal muscles also became tight. This caused pain in the peroneal tendons that run behind the outer ankle bone. Injury of these tendons include tendonitis, tears and subluxation – the latter of which is not pretty in the least.

Peroneal injuries are caused by injury/trauma to the ankle, such as a sprain, or from overuse of the tendon (training that does not include sufficient periods of rest). Having high arches also puts you at greater risk for peroneal injury, and could lead to developing a degenerative tear.

My full-year training plan has been re-worked. Running has been replaced with long walks, and the strengthening phase began last week instead of next month. I have succumbed to a massage that helped relax the calves and the peroneal muscles – something my husband had suggested in early March. The swelling is slowly subsiding, but the tendons remain tender to the touch. This has clearly been a peroneal mess of my own making.

Follow-up: when the swelling was gone and the peroneal tendon had fully healed, it became obvious there was another underlying issue with my heel: a ‘pump bump.’

The Pump Bump and Achilles Tendinitis