Feet and salt water

Sometime last week or so, I switched up my shoes and started running in Asics Nimbus's. I've run in them in the past, but it's been a couple generations since they've worked for me, and I was excited with how comfy/cushy they were.

And then I started feeling an irritation on my left heel.

This happens with most shoes: I wear a hole in the heel cup with my boney heel. Usually, the shoe will end up with a hole, but my heel will be ok. Not this time. I distinctly remember, last Wednesday, feeling something like a grain of sand rubbing on my heel while I was on the running store group run. I was pissed. I knew it wasn't going to be good.

I had tried to drain the blister, but it wasn't like a real blister -- not much to drain, but a round, little bubble nonetheless. By Saturday, I was really hurting. In fact, my run was scheduled to be a fartlek run -- 6 total miles, with 2 warm up and 4 miles of 2 minutes hard, 2 minutes easy.

I did ok for the first few miles, but by mile 3.5 -4 I was almost crying as I ran. I stopped, readjusted my sock, tried again. Pain. I took off the pre-wrap that I wear under my Garmin and folded it up like a pad, put it on my heel, and tried again. More pain. Nothing worked. I ran the rest of the workout feeling like there were razors slicing my heel open. I fought back tears. I concentrated on keeping my form, but knew there was a definite favoring of that foot that I couldn't avoid.

Beware, gross foot picture coming...




See that white blister-looking thing? That's where the bone's sticking out. It's still not a drainable blister, it's a bump that's getting irritated with all my attempts to drain stuff out of it.

This morning I set out for my LR with all sorts of interventions: aquaphor, bandaid, cotton ball held over the spot with pre-wrap and held in place with athletic tape, duct tape over that, and duct tape over the hole in my shoe.

I got through the run, but fought the heel pain the whole way. My legs felt fantastic today, and I was super psyched about that, but the heel pain dampened my excitement.

Nothing was working. The pain was bad, the bump was big, it wasn't looking good.


It was time to hit the salt water. I started with a good old Epsom Salt and hot water soak. I like those, usually, but I could just tell this wasn't going to be good enough.

So I hit the beach, and spent time with my feet in this water instead:

I've iced, vitamin-I'ed, and I'm switching my day off from running from Wednesday to tomorrow.

If all that salt water in the ocean hasn't fixed this yet, I'll give it one more day. After that, I may be the wacko running down the street with one running shoe sporting a gigantic opening to let my heel hang out...