If you’ve been following this blog at all, you know I’ve struggled with an Achilles injury for the entirety of 2022. (And probably before that if I’m being honest.) After six months of absolutely no running, I’m easing back into it carefully. It’s affected my life profoundly.

I searched all over the internet for information on this injury. Yes, I wanted answers and medically backed references that what I was doing in therapy was correct. But I also wanted to know that it was going to work. I wanted hope. I joined Facebook groups, I watched TikTok videos, I was insane and obsessed, y’all. But I’m putting this out there because I know someone else is probably doing the same right now and I’ll put this out there in case it helps. A lot of getting past this injury is mental.

I’ve had running injuries before and had to stop running to rehab them. Because of this, I’m usually pretty quick to get help if I notice pain that’s not going away. Like most runners, I don’t like to stop running. However, this injury scared me, and I jumped through some mental hoops before I finally decided to get some help.

Achilles tendonitis is the common name, Achilles tendonosis is the more medically accurate name. Most forums still refer to it by tendonitis because … well, that’s what most people know it as, so for the purposes of this entry, that’s the term I’m going to use. I just didn’t want a bunch of emails correcting me. There are also different types, insertional—down near the heel where the tendon attaches—and non insertional, my version, more in the ‘belly’ of the tendon. I believe non insertional is more common, but don’t cite me on that.

This is something that affects a lot of runners, and it’s also terrifying, because most of the time, the solution is to stop running for a while. A long while. Sometimes you can rehab it while you continue to train, as long as you keep an eye on it. This is what I tried to do for about a year.

In May of 2021, I’d sustained a hip/inner thigh injury that I won’t go into, but once I returned to running for that, I noticed my opposite Achilles was sore. My PT added some heel drop exercises to strengthen it because she thought I might be developing tendonitis, then I went on my way. I was discharged for the hip injury shortly afterward. I had been out of running for months and I was thrilled to be back. For a while, I stuck to training plans, continued with my PT and those heel drops. I thought my Achilles was slowly getting better. Maybe it was.

I ran a half marathon in October in Louisville. The night before, I had run around in very high heels all night to the pre-race stuff. Terrible idea. I remember that the worst part during the race was tied between the freezing wind and my Achilles pain. I wore heels after the race too. Figured I’d take it easy for a week when I got home. I was gonna be in the car for hours the next day anyway. I think this is the point where my Achilles stopped ‘improving’ if it ever really was.

My last race was a 15k in February of 2022. After that race I decided to just ‘run what I wanted’ for a while. I need to stop here and add that while I was doing these training plans during the summer and fall, I sometimes ran extra on the easy days. I was just so thrilled to be running again that I thought, hey, three miles just doesn’t seem long enough to be out here. How about just four easy miles? You can imagine how running ‘whatever I wanted’ turned out. By my birthday in mid-March, I was pretty sure there was a problem. I was mentally telling myself that if I didn’t do something, I was going to end up rupturing this thing and having surgery and then being out for six months or more. I scheduled physical therapy but couldn’t get in until April.

In the meantime, my friend Melissa was dealing with her own medical things. (I must add that she’s a physician’s assistant and I’m a certified personal trainer, so we know what we’re talking about, we just sometimes don’t like doing what we say to ourselves.) She was concerned about losing too much weight, I was concerned about my Achilles. At some point I told her that I should just do whatever she told me to do. She said, “I would tell you to stop running for two weeks.” I said, “I’ll do it if you keep a food diary for two weeks.” She said the f word. But we did it.

I did not start running again after two weeks. I was amazed at how much my tendon still hurt. I was shocked when I realized I couldn’t even bike without pain. I should have stopped earlier. I wish I had stopped earlier. If you’re reading this and you’re thinking you might need to stop, you need to stop. Your recovery will be faster if you stop sooner. Stop. Go to PT. I know it sucks. The sooner you do it, the sooner you’ll be through it.

Let’s fast forward.

You know I went to PT and you know that I managed to find other ways to stay in shape. Let’s get to the part that people going through this might want/need to hear. First, how do you stay in shape when you can’t do anything jumping related and very little with your leg? It’s a challenge.

ARC Trainer on the left, rowing machine on the right.

If you have a gym, they have a thing called an ARC Trainer. It’s similar to an elliptical, but your feet just go forward and back instead of in a swooping circle. You can also swing your arms like you’re running. This is the closest to running I was able to get and what sustained me for those first few months when I couldn’t bike. The rowing machine is also an option, and I did that too, but beware blisters on your hands if you try and row for anywhere near how long you tried to run. I also didn’t get the same release from rowing. The downside to both of these for me, is that I missed being outside. I like watching the sunrise. It’s my meditation. I also started getting headaches from the screen time I was getting because I started revising and editing my manuscripts on the ARC trainer. Previously this had been an hour without screens.

If you don’t have a gym, you can try walking, but keep it slow. Pay attention to your tendon. It’s not worth it to limp through a stupid walk and put your running date even further away. Once I was able to bike, I biked outside. This was great, just to get outside again. I still had to pay attention to the tendon and was honest with myself and my therapist about how it was going.

Do your PT every single day.

How about getting your heartrate up? This was my biggest challenge.

When I gave up teaching—and consequently access to the gym I was teaching at—I was getting outside and riding my bike again, but didn’t have the ARC trainer to get my heartrate up. The one thing I’ve found that works without straining the tendon is a combination of kettlebell swings and push ups. Here’s how it works:

Set a timer for 10, 15, 20 however many minutes you want. For the first 20 seconds of the minute, do kettlebell swings. (If you don’t have a kettlebell, you can use a dumbbell, like I did, just hold it by one of the ends, not the middle, so you get that unbalanced weight to swing.) After the swings, do six push ups. Rest for the remainder of the minute. Repeat. Go ahead and look up the proper form for swings if you don’t know it already because that is key.

Eat less. Drink less.

Yeah, it’s one of the worst things about not running. You can’t just ‘yes and’ when someone had the idea for pizza on a random night anymore. I had to cut back on everything. And not just the unhealthy stuff. Booze was a big one. It’s a lot of empty calories. Do it gradually, but do it. Especially when you’re miserable because you can’t run and you're bored because you have all of this energy that you can’t properly burn off and you can’t even do yard work because your ankle hurts. It's very tempting to just have a couple drinks to slow your mind down. If you’re okay with gaining a ton of weight, okay, but it’s going to make it that much harder on your body when you try to start running again. Weigh your pros and cons.

This one’s for the boob-having folks among us. No matter what you do, it’s possible they’ll get bigger. This was the WORST aspect for me. I hate my boobs. I’ve made peace with them at a certain size, but after several months of no running, they grew. Even when all my pants fit great. Even when my weight was the same. Nothing I could do would shrink them. I googled surgery more times than I want to admit. I googled this particular situation hoping to find some runner out there who had been through this who could tell me that I would get through it, to no avail.

You will get through it. Get a couple of bras to get you through this time. I know they’re expensive. And yes, it’s okay to wear a binder or a sports bra constantly if that makes you feel better mentally. I don’t care what anyone else says. You’re already on the struggle bus. Don’t add more luggage. Work on healing. You will get through this. Feel free to email me if you need someone to vent to.

Now let’s get to the most mentally challenging part: when your PT says it’s okay to start running again.

You might be thinking, how is this the worst part? This is what I’ve been working for! Stay with me.

After almost six months, my PT said I could try running. I was to walk a warm up, then run for one minute, walk for one minute, five times, then walk a cool down. At first, I was thrilled. I was RUNNING again. But not only will you quickly get frustrated by only running one minute, if your PT doesn’t tell you, you’ll quickly realize that you cannot run as fast as your body wants to.

I highly recommend dry needling once you’re out of the woods. It doesn’t do much for your Achilles, as it’s a tendon, but it will help the muscles as they adjust.

That first time I went running, I was doing 7 minute miles. I was filled with JOY and glee! Later that day I couldn’t walk. My Achilles was so sore. I was crushed. When I saw my PT again, he told me I’d gone out too fast and put too much impact on the tendon. For a long while, I had to do these runs painfully slow. And I couldn’t enjoy the minute of running because I had to focus all my mental energy on keeping myself slow enough so that my Achilles didn’t complain.

Here’s the part that I wasn’t ready for and couldn’t find any anecdotal information about: other parts of your body are going to start hurting. My soleus was a big issue for me when I started running again. I would think that my Achilles was in pain, but as soon as I did some trigger point rolling on my soleus, that pain would go away. It is normal for other parts of your calf to become deconditioned. Don’t get too discouraged by pay attention to it. I’ll tell you why.

After several weeks of this, my soleus was still complaining and I wasn’t running much faster. I was supremely frustrated and my PT felt we were missing something. (I’ll throw in a fun fact that Word would like me to change ‘soleus’ to ‘soul’. My soul was complaining too, rest assured.) On one ‘run’ I stared at my feet. Pissed at them. What was I missing? And I noticed that my right foot, that’s the uninjured side, was pointing out to the right. When I forced it back to the center, the pressure on my left soleus went away like magic and my right hip was like… hey, I was enjoying a nice long vacation.

I’m pretty sure that all of my issues stem back to that initial injury back in 2021. However, with this new information, I started hitting my hip hard. I’d already been rehabbing it, but was so focused on my left side that I wasn’t paying much attention to what my right foot had been doing. Not only that, I looked at my running form. After that hip injury, I’d adopted a few weird habits to compensate. This was a turning point for me. So pay attention to all those little aches and pains, but know that there are going to be some. Your entire calf has probably been through some stuff and those muscles are all going to chat with you when you ask them to work again. Just don’t go out too fast and be honest and detailed with your therapist.

And now the hope you’ve been searching for.

I still can’t run hill repeats, but I’ll get there.

I’m finally doing what I consider ‘running.’ I’m not back up to the volume that I was when I quit, but that’s okay. I’ve also hired a running coach because I listen to an outside voice better than I listen to myself and I don’t want to get injured again. I’m currently running four days a week. I bike on the other days. This weekend we have my first five mile run scheduled. I’m super excited.

I can tell my leg is getting better. Yes, it needs those off days, and the improvement is very slow, but when I look back over time, it’s definitely improving. My boobs have shrunk back down. It happened very quickly once I started running again and it was glorious. I was already healthy, but I’m even more so now because for seven months I was motivated to give up pastries, pizza, booze, pretty much anything so that I could be as healthy as possible and get back to running faster. I have the occasional pastry and pizza now and enjoy it that much more, but I’m no longer of the ‘I can eat whatever I want and just run it off later’ mindset. And I think that’s for the best.

I look forward to the day when I can drop the biking and just run. (I don’t like suiting up for biking when it’s cold.) But for now, I’m thrilled to be able to see the sun rise again. I’m getting back to my old paces again. And I’m even getting to that point where I can let my mind go when I run and not spend every second worrying about what my body is doing.

It happened for me and it can happen for you.

Achilles Tenonitis - light at the end of the tunnel