Two days back in Blighty and I’d gotten sufficiently concerned about my foot to take medical advice. Although it’s not a serious worry, the nah-sayers against barefoot running love to warn of the dreaded metatarsal stress fracture for anyone who dares run without a pair of expensive padded trainers on their feet. Like most people who’ve discovered barefoot running, I think this is a load of bollocks. Until now of course. Now that I’ve got an unexplained injury in the region of my 3rd or 4th metatarsal, all sorts of irrational thinking is taking place.
I put up with this for two days before I really had to know if I’d done anything to the bones. No point in walking around on it if I should really have it in a cast. So this evening I headed down to my local A&E to get it checked out.
Mission: Get them to X-Ray it at all costs, do not be fobbed off with anything less.
So to be fair, by the time I got down there it wasn’t hurting all that much. The underlying problem was still there, but as I’d been dosing up on Ibuprofen all day, it wasn’t giving me much pain. I therefore decided to ham it up a bit, in order to have them decide that they wanted to X-Ray it. I checked in, saw the triage nurse and sat down expecting to be waiting hours. Much to my surprise I was seen within 20 minutes and 10 minutes after that (following my acting debut) I was having my X-Rays. They couldn’t find any fracture, break or any other problem with any of the bones and where at a loss to explain the problem. No problem I said, relieved that it was something to do with the soft tissues, rather than a break of any kind, and couldn’t get out of there fast enough.
I’ve obviously strained something, and it will just require a little time and rest to fix it. I’m going to take it as easy as I can over the next few weeks and continue to do no running at all.