A departure for today...

I'm going to depart from my "shoe design" thoughts for a day and just give an update on what's happening with the feet and legs. Fortunately, my feet are doing fine. The emphasis on not pushing off with the calves has done wonders for keeping any symptoms of Frieberg's from showing up in my right foot. Keeping the foot as flat as possible throughout the entire gait seems to be the key here.

But... I'm having some issues with my right achilles tendon. It's quite tender, about one inch above where it attaches to the heel bone. It started a little last week, after 3 days in a row running. I took one off, riding my MTB instead, and it felt pretty good. Followed that with another 3 days in a row, higher mileage the first two, and it came on strong. The third day, I altered my stride a bit (shorter strides, higher cadence, relaxing the foot as much as possible, more of a flat-foot landing), and I made it through the run fine with minimal "pain" (wasn't really "pain", but I was aware of the tendon), but the soreness came on even more after. I found myself limping a bit, and needing several steps before it loosened up enough to be able to walk with some semblance of normalcy.

So I'm taking a few days off running, doing bike riding instead (I've been neglecting that of late, so this isn't such a bad thing), and trying some other things to see what happens. One thing I did was to go barefoot last night around the house. Surprisingly, it helped. I noticed while I was riding my stationary trainer last night that there was an imprint in my leg from the socks I'd been wearing most of the day, and it coincided almost exactly with were the point pain in my achilles. So today, I'm at work sockless, and taking my shoes off as much as I can (obviously I can't walk around that way). But the achilles is feeling better, so there may be something to the socks. Or it could just be that not running is doing it. Maybe I'll be ditching my socks... And maybe some zero-drop daily wear shoes are in order (can I make it another 3 weeks for the Merrels to get distributed?).

Other than that little niggling issue, all is going well. I've been feeling good on my long-ish runs. Form is coming with much less mind-space being taken up in maintaining it, and the 4-5 mile runs are feeling pretty effortless. Though I may be set back a bit from that with this achilles issue. Recovery should be fast.

In another vein... what's with losing the pictures from the blog? Apparently I need to not refer to stock photos from other sites and load them onto my own machine before linking them to my blog. And it's interesting what happens to the formatting between typing up the items and having them post publicly. Right/left formatting for the pictures gets lost mostly. Oh well. I'm not getting paid for this...