Heelectomy

One of the first pieces of advice that I read on insertional achilles is to cut a slit or a V into the heel counter of your running shoe. In fact, I've seen advice to do this prophylactically. I chose not to cut any of my new running shoes but I switched immediately to the Nike Frees (1st edition), which have a very soft, flexible heel counter, for my everyday shoe. After failure to find any pattern in what does and does not aggravate the achilles, I decided to cut a slit into my NB790s for my 10 mile run at Pineland yesterday. My feet felt great when I got home but I put on a pair of Wellies (rubber boots) to do some yard work and hadn't walked 50 yards before my achilles was screaming. I had worn these only a few days before with no pain so clearly there was a run X boot interaction. I switched into my slit running shoes to do yard work but the damage was done, my achilles was sore all evening. Today I woke up with zero achilles pain and ran 110 minutes in the same slit NB790s. Again, everything felt great. I then slit a pair of old NB 901 road shoes for yard work. OMFG, the 901s are considered a lightweight trainer but the heel counter was more earthquake proof than a tokyo skyscraper. It took quite the surgery to cut out a V (a simple slit wouldn't have done anything with the plastic stability plate in there). Regardless, it worked and my achilles feels fine. I'm a little hesitant to slit my new inov8 195s so I'll probably just run in old shoes for a while; hopefully not all season.

I've finished week two of easy running - no tempos, MP, intervals, fartleks, sprints, etc, although I did do strides at Twin Brook on Tuesday. And I did 4 x 800m hill repeats at 127, 132, 137, 142HR (all still very far inside my aerobic zone - less than 80% HRmax). I'm planning on running MD5K Sunday and I suspect my achilles will not be happy about that. And I suspect the 25K at Pineland will be even worse.

Total Time: 8:27
Total Miles: 55.9

M  Passive Recovery
T easy 1:10 (8 mi)TMR TNR @TB
W easy 1:32 (9.3 mi), Presumpscot River Westbrook
R Fast-easy 1:15 (9.7 mi), Back Cove/East End trail
F 4 x 800 slow to fast easy hill repeats 1:08 (7.7 mi), Brook Rd/Halls Hill
S  easy 1:33 (10.5), Pineland
S easy 1:48 (10.8), Presumpscot River Westbrook



            M     T        W        R      F       S        S
Plan (min)  45    75       90       75     60      120      90
Plan (HR)   L1    L3-4     L1-2     L4     L1-2    L3-4     L1-2
Time (min)        70       92       75     68      94       108
Miles             8        9.3      9.7    7.7     10.5     10.8
AHR               133      127      139    128     133      126
HR %              76       72       79     73      76       72