“I worked homicide before federal. This is what we call an orgy of evidence.” — Colin Farrell, Minority Report (2002)

I feel as if I’ve stumbled upon an orgy of exactly the information I’ve been seeking for a little over a month now, yet until yesterday could not find a shred of what I’ve considered legit info.

What was I looking for?, you ask. I was in search of finding out what, if anything, I could take or try to consume that would help the recovery/prevent further injury of my achilles, and for that matter, all tendons and ligaments in my body. Sounds simple enough, right? Just type a few quick words into Google and voila, I should have more answers than I know what to do with.

But I quickly discovred that I was unable to type in the right combination of words to get the type of answers which I desired. I was searchng for something seemed reputable, but I would time-and-time-again get nothing but links to body building forums and their discussions tendon and ligament health. Now, it’s not that I don’t think body-builders know what they’re talking about, it’s just that I prefer not to put anything in my body that comes in a container that features holographic lettering and contains an over-abundant use of the letter “x” and a superfluous amount of words like “ripper”, “mega”, and “nitro”.

Apparently, Google is like this keeper of information, that can give you everything you want, so much even that you may get “overloaded” with information as Bing keeps telling me; but in order to get this information you’ve got to enter it in the right sequence or else you only get links to things that sort of what you’re looking for, but really not all that close at all once you actually click on them.

After being pretty much over my Google search for the answers, I performed a keybouad finger smash out of frustration and looked up at the screen to find a link sitting at the top that I hadn’t yet clicked on before. “This could be promising,” I thought to msyelf. I clicked on the link and was more than delighted to find a discussion on a forum between ultrarunners about achilles treatment, and to find that one of the commenters had given a list of nutritional supplements that he had used while successfully treating his problem. Absent were the cheesey names used in body-building powders, and instead he was recommending things that you can find at any run of the mill pharmacy or as part of most daily multi-vitamins, only he included what he had found were the proper doseage amounts. “Finally!” I wanted to exclaim, but I didn’t for fear that my co-workers would give me even funnier looks than they normally do.

Anyway, the recommendations that I picked up were to begin taking l-lysine, l-glysine, glucosamine and upping my intake of vitamins C & E. After looking a little more info on each of these, it all seemed to make sense. L-lysine and glucosamine seem to help with the production of collagen, which it turns out is what tendons are made of. To quote the weird Guinnes commercials of a few years back, “Brilliant!” So I’ve now picked up some l-lysine and glucosamine, as well as a daily multi-vitamin which I probably should be taking anyway.

Even better, I found some more info right along the realm of what I was looking for today on the ultrarunning.com website. Why I’ve never bothered to hit up this resource before today kind of baffles me, but let’s just say I’m glad that I did search through the medical and nutrition section ‘til I found the article that could have saved a lot of frustrated Googling in the first place: “Nutritional support for sport injuries - Eating your way to recovery”. I’m really happy about this one becuase it gives suggestions for things besides supplements to include in the diet.

Though I would have liked to have come across this information well in advance of 3 1/2 months into recovery, I’m glad I at least found it now. Hopefully this might make the return to running come a bit quicker and help me to stay healtheir once back.