This is kinda lengthy…
I’ve been a runner for over 25 years, and always enjoyed it. While my knees are perhaps showing a bit of wear and tear, they really don’t bother me much at all.
But, over the last 5-6 years or so, I’ve been having a recurring problem with my right calf muscle. About midway across (laterally) my calf muscle, maybe 70% down the bulky, rounder calf muscle mass (but not in the narrower muscle that comes up from my ankle), I am constantly having a problem.
The problem starts like this. I gently stretch and loosen up, but I’ve always generally just gone out slow to get warmed up. I’ll be running along (or on the treadmill). I might be running for 5 minutes, or for 25 minutes. Things feel great - no pain, no tightness. Then within a couple of strides, I get a very sharp pain deep inside the muscle area that I tried to describe above. It feels like a nail has been pushed into the muscle - it’s painful and scary enough that it stops me dead in my tracks. Sometimes I get maybe a few strides warning, and if I pull up, it doesn’t slam me as hard, and I can then walk for a while and it subsides a little (but the run is definitely over). In the cases where it comes on suddenly, the run is over RIGHT NOW, and I end up with tightness and pain over at least several days that occasionally makes it difficult to walk down the stairs. It’s as though I’ve seriously strained some muscle deep down in the muscle mass. It can take 10-14 days to feel OK again. If I try to then go for a run - even an easy run - it might be OK for a few days, or it might start acting up right away. If I stop running for a month, it seems to go away, but always shows up again sooner or later.
This is really putting a hitch in my git-along. Granted, I used to weight about 175, and now I weigh about 215 (probably 20 pounds extra muscle from 4 years of weightlifting, and some fat that I’d like to run off).
What the heck is causing this injury? Am I just a little too heavy for my muscle structure to handle it? I haven’t been able to figure out a warmup/stretching routine that makes it better. When I used to run 5 days a week, I NEVER had a problem like this. I’ve also noticed that it sometimes occurs a bit lower inthe narrower part of the muscle maybe an inch or two down towards my ankle, but still up in or very near my calf.
Thoughts and opinions? I really love to run, but this is ruining it.
Thanks…