Afternoon everyone,
As one of the more run-focused people round these parts, I finally succumbed to what I thought was a stress fracture a few weeks back. Starting with a bit of history is:
Over the past years I’ve been a fairly consistent 60mpw average runner never with any bone stress injuries, generally healthy, balanced diet, do some S&C regularly, all the fairly standard stuff that’s unremarkable.
This year have had a couple niggles with a calf/quad that interrupted training over a few weeks but did run London Marathon with a friend 2:49 which was a nice run out but certainly not all out. The following weeks I was on holiday and still ran avg 40-50 mile weeks which were all enjoyable miles, no issue and this continued once home and did have a 60 mile week right up to the incident.
Fast forward to a few Sundays back, went for a 10 mile run up and down the canal, really nice run nothing remarkable at all till home and in the shower (bare foot) and noticed ‘that’s a strange pain in my foot’
Didn’t run then for the next 6 days and then thought would see how parkrun went ‘just 3 miles on grass’ and that was pretty much it. Run was ok but could feel it all the way round then after was too painful to walk on. Swollen fore foot and then when woke up the following Sunday (now a week on from the last pain free run) and swelling still there so went to A&E, sent for X-Ray and a fracture of the 4th metatarsal shaft.
Treatment has been as you would expect, boot, let pain subside and gradual return to walking (which I hope to start very soon) but I had my fracture clinic follow up today and the consultant took one look and said ‘that’s not a stress fracture’ and I must have done something to break the bone and maybe just didn’t notice because of hit threshold and running endorphins etc.
In some ways it’s Irellevant and hopefully just bad luck but the rapid onset and going straight from sight pain to fracture isn’t the stereotypical stress fracture pathway. Also, my typical load, getting a stress fracture when not training hard and the unusual location of 4th metatarsal shaft dont favour a stress fracture but I still find it odd I fractured it. Can you have a stress fracture that’s there and completely unaware maybe and it either breaks with a ‘lower than normal’ trauma or have I just been really unlucky and trod on something, not realised and broke it!
Certainly a bit of a mystery to me and interested in others experiences!