Aqua Jogging and Bone Spurs

Well, I've been resting a bit on the running front lately. I noted back in March that I suddenly had some foot pain on a (normal) long run on 3/18. I raced the next weekend and it was fine (although my race SUUUUCKED possibly because I took it so easy leading up to it to rest my foot). I just ran twice the next week, and it wasn't good.

So then I took over a week off from running: I ran on Friday 3/30, and didn't run again until this past Sunday 4/8. I aqua jogged on Wednesday and Friday of last week (my normal run days). Here's my red belly in the locker room after some aqua jogging belt rubbage on my tum-tum:

I've been icing and heating my left foot 1 or 2 times every day (ice for 15 mins, heat for 15 mins). I took 2 hot epsom salt baths this week and last week to help "flush" anything out. During my first one, Charlie came up to read his tractor book to me:

Adorable.

Two days ago, I had my hardest/longest Spinnerval workout of the winter. I did most of Spinnervals 15.0 (just skipping the 3rd part of the warm up and the final 5x1 min efforts at the end) only skipping 15 minutes of a 2 hour DVD workout. It was brutal: after 2 warm ups, it was a 10 minute tempo, 30 minute tempo, 15 minutes tempo, some 1-legged drills, and then I forget... I was BEAT UP. Here was my sweat running off the mat and toward the drain as I was about 60 minutes in:

Normal pic on the left, sweat trails highlighted in red on the right.


1:45 of sweat. Gross. I went through 2 big water bottles
and 1 smaller one with electrolytes in it.

Yesterday, I had an appointment with a podiatrist to talk over these recent foot issues to make sure I wasn't royally screwing something up. Here's Charlie and I waiting to see the doc:

Here's the Cliff Notes version of our meeting:

- No stress fracture. (I didn't think I had one.)
- "Very obvious" signs of 1 or 2 bone spurs on the top of my left foot.
- Also most likely some osteoarthritis in that foot.
- The bone-on-bone action (hot) is what's causing the pain.
- Surgery is an option WAAAY down the line.
- I should do what feels good: keep icing/heating as I want.
- The metatarsal pads I was given to wear in 2016 are still good to be wearing; that's a separate issue.
- Loosening my shoes (running and normal shoes) as much as I can will help the pain go away.
- Doc showed me a way to lace my shoes to remove pressure from that point if I want to try that.
- Doc also gave me pads to cut into "U"s to put in the tongue of my shoes if I want to (to relieve pressure from the sore spot).
- Some good orthotics would help. (Every podiatrist is required to say this by law. I'm pretty sure.)
- If nothing helps, we could have an MRI, but that's far from needed right now.

If I'm recalling correctly, here's where he felt the bone spurs. Way down
the line, I may have to have the metatarsals and cuneiforms screwed together.

So hopefully scaling it back a bit for another week will help get me back on the right track.