Doctor visit
As promised, I went and saw Dr. Spears today. The good news is that he’s sure I don’t have a stress fracture. There is a tender spot on my right leg, but he says if I had a stress fracture some of the poking around he was doing would have caused excruciating pain.
Anyway, what he wrote down on the card was “medial tibial stress“, and as you can see, Google knows that’s the technical term for shin splints. Now I know, too.
Anyway, he said I need to practice the eccentric motion on calf raises. This is similar to my hip problem a few months ago, where again I was weak with the eccentric motion. Fortunately, he was confident that I can fix this by doing those exercises correctly and doing more stretching. I am supposed to back off on the intensity of my running until the symptoms go away.
So that’s a relief. I feel much better having had a doctor look at it. I talked to Gilbert, and I am going to try sticking to the trail and the grass for a little bit to try to take some of the pounding from the roads out of the equation.