Up to this point, I have approached this achilles injury with two objectives: to heal my achilles while also maintaining fitness so that I’d be able to earnestly toe the starting line at the Collegiate Peaks Trail Run 50-miler on May 7.

Well, I have come to the shitty realization that it simply isn’t going to happen that way.

I’ve now been 3 months without running. I think I’ve made it for a total of 35 pain-free minutes during that time over a span of five, maybe six runs in all. And after each of the pain-free runs (one of 25 and one of 10 minutes), my ankle felt wrecked the next day.

Perhaps at a later point than I should have, I’ve come to the conclusion that cross-training to maintain fitness and trying to heal at the same time is not exactly working out. Hence, I am shifting towards a 100% recovery-focused approach at this point, and cutting out the 2+ hours a day of XT.

The latest devastating attempt at returing to running came last Friday (April 1st). I made it 10 minutes with no pain on the treadmill. Everything felt wonderful. I thought for sure that my running stride would feel awkward and clunky, but much to my happiness it felt fairly smooth and crisp. Imagine walking into your kitchen one night, really craving a handful of delicious Doritos, but finding that the only remaining bag has been sitting wide open in the pantry for a week. You grab that handful slightly depressed that you are going to be shoving sub-optimal, no longer crunchy cheese-powder-coated corn chips into your mouth…but somehow, they are just as crunchy and satisfying as if you had just opened up a brand new bag. That’s what Friday on the treadmill on felt like for my running stride. It was, well, fantastic.

I cut myself off at the predetermined time of 10 minutes, still feeling good about it on my way to the elliptical, which also felt fine for an hour.

I awoke to a brisk, sunny and windy Saturday morning and hopped on the bike for a decently long ride. It started off great, but midway through was when devastation struck again, and my achilles - the whole ankle, actually - started to feel trashed. This, as you can imagine, I was not happy about. The thought of hopping off the bike and having a good cry right in the middle of the road occurred to me….but I didn’t.

Upon mentioning the latest failure to return to running to the athletic trainers, they mentioned “scraping,” also known as “Graston Massage.”

Graston involves special metal tools which are schockingly expensive considring they look like things that you might find in your sliverware drawer, and since the set that the trainers used to have has turned up missing, we are using a wooden spoon as a makeshift tool. Pam, who performed my first “scraping” yesterday, says that it will pretty much accomplish the same thing, but for a fraction of the cost.

Basically, from what I understand, “scraping” will help to break up the adhesions which have formed on the soft tissue tendon and that are rubbing against and sort of connecting to the achilles sheath. It is that rubbing and connecting which causes the pain I have been experiencing. By digging in with the tool - in this case a wooden spoon - the adhesions are broken and sort of flushed out. I of course looked up this technique after Pam mentioned it to me, and can’t believe I hadn’t come across if before when reseraching achilles injuries. Once I “Googled” it, I found a ton of information and almost nothing but positive reviews.

I’m excited to be starting this, but at the same time also starting to get real anxious. Finishing my bike ride on Saturday, my achilles was feeling like it was back at square one from January - not a great feeling after having already been away from running for 3 whole months.

Taking this new recovery-focused approach I think will help. I will continue to work on strengthening, do some ultrasound and stretching regularly, but I be cutting out the cross-training for the next 3-4 weeks. No longer will I be approaching this with the hopes that I can recover while maintaining my fitness, but I will be approaching with the mindset of needing to recover so that I can resume running and doing what I love.

This, I know, is going to be tough. Without cross-training, my day is reduced to looking foward to one single thing: getting home and spending time with Melissa, and I’m very happy to have that to look foward to. But I will no longer have morning and lunch-hour trips to the gym to look foward to, an activity with which to break up the painful boringness of the work day.

I no longer really care about the fact that I won’t really be able to race at all anytime soon. All I want is to return to running and getting outdoors and experiencing the joy that I always get when propelling myself using only my own two feet. The return to that, whenver it may be, I know will make a lot of things seem better.

I’m not expecting miracles, but I am expecting progress with this new approach.