8 weeks ago, after getting home from a particularly fast run I remarked to my wife that my knee was feeling pretty stiff.
With two decades of training, pushing my body to some legitimate extremes in training under the bar with powerlifting at a high level, I didn't think much of it.
When you train with appreciable intensity, you get used to a certain baseline of soreness. Given my training history, this wasn't the first time I'd pulled up sore from a training session, so I simply trusted that it would settle in 24-48 hours as many of these issues often do.
Despite the fairly extreme stiffness that had settled in by later that night, I still trusted my experience and training history; "This will settle." I reassured myself that night.
By around 2am the pain had intensified enough to wake me up, so I got up to take an aspirin to help it settle, and immediately felt my leg give way once my foot hit the floor. I was completely non-weight bearing on my left side.
I (very understandably) decided to skip my recovery run the next day.
When the pain was still lingering, and a lot of swelling had started to creep in over the next two days rather than having the condition improve, I suspected that I'd done a pretty significant injury at this point.
Around 7-10 days later, after seeing some genuine concern on the face of
@hawkeandcophysio post-assessment, an MRI was able to confirm a stress fracture of the posterior tibial cortex.
While I was pretty fortunate to have a posterior fracture rather than an anterior one, this news delivered a fairly crushing blow to the momentum I'd built, after nearly 6-8 months of building up to 60km weekly running volumes, and having multiple races lined up for the near future.
While painful, it allowed me an opportunity to address a lot of blind-spots in my training - consistent calf training, plyometrics, frontal plane competency.
It's going to be a long road back, but today I was officially given the good news - we start running again on Tuesday.
A flare up is likely, maybe even a relapse, but I know that I've never been more motivate to get back on the pavement in even better condition, and finally tick off those marathons.
