New Injury: Planar Fasciitis

I went for biweekly sport massage at Ambition Fitness yesterday and yes, we found out what was the cause of the flaming feet I got! Hehe... It is called Planar Fasciitis, which I knew in the morning, diagnosed by my colleague, Mie.

Basically, due to fatigue calf muscles (in my case, as I can feel how tight they are), and linkage of CT band (Gastrocnemius + Soleus + Achilles tendon + plantar fascia), tension was too much for plantar fascia (the weakest link) and therefore caused the the inflammatory effects - the burning sensation. This further aggravated with the collapsing of my arch (probably lack of insole support). As plantar fasciitis is also a form of repetitive stress injury, I caused too much damage (with the amount of running I did lately) and gave it insufficient time to repair itself.

My physio, Harrall (if I got it right) was just superb with her hands. Since I have been rolling on the firm roller to stretch the ITB muscle, she decided to focus on my calf and hamstring. Believe me, I couldn't stop mourning and burying my face on the pillow periodically. All my muscles were just so tight and knotted!

For the ITB, it is not as painful anymore, though the ache and pain do return once in a while, usually more painful after a long run. It would comes with a bang: acute sharp pain for like 2 mins. Ouch! It is like I cant bend my knee at all and have to limp. The only way is to do my routine rolling, until the pain fades away. another thing is to strengthen my glut muscle. Weak glut muscle causes the pain in ITB (I feel that's my case).

Because I cant stop training now, the only thing I can do now is stretch, stretch and stretch, even when I am not running. Harrall suggestion is to place a hot pat on the calf muscle before stretch to warm them up a little. Do long and slow stretches, instead of short dramatic ones.

Ambition fitness was in Queen Mother sport Center. I decided to go swim in the 25m pool instead of running 7 miles, just to give my foot a rest. Anyway I got a free pass to test out the gym. So to convert 7 miles of running to swimming, I need to do 1.75 miles, translated to 112 lapses in a 25m pool. I did 100 lapses ... I think. It is so easy to lose count, but I figured if I spent 60mins in the pool, and I was on the 'Fast and Furious' land (~25 seconds per lapse), give and take a few mins clearing my googles, I should have done at least 100 lapse. (BTW I was a swimmer during elementary school to early high school, representing my school.)

Swimming is definitely much better for my feet and I can feel that I am exercising my whole body. I would do it more often and maybe use it to replace my short runs until the marathon.