My Feet Hurt

As I mentioned on Monday, my feet have been bothering me lately. 

I thought I might elaborate so as to put your fears at ease.  Here's the nitty-gritty:

I go to bed at night, things seem fine.
I get up in the morning and take my first step out of bed, and I am forced to hobble like a granny into the shower.

The pain is mostly in the center of my left heel radiating outward towards the back edge.  Although the right does get tender at times, too.  When I touch the area that hurts, it almost feels tender like when you touch a bruise.

It's not very fun. 

It's also not very consistent.  Some days I can get up and have little to no pain.  Other days I can barely stand to put weight on my left heel in order to walk out of bed.

Eventually, as I put weight on it during my morning routine, it loosens up and stops hurting ... or stops hurting as bad.

Unfortunately, I haven't' figured out yet what triggers it.  And it seems like there's also no correlation to what exercises bother it, and which ones don't.  At first I thought it was totally running related, and then I completed a run with no issues the next morning ... that was followed two days later with extreme pain after teaching a TBC class (which I only participated in at about 50% effort).

So annoying.

Upon talking with some friends in the Run Club a couple weeks ago about my issue, it sounds like I have plantar's fasciitis. 

The solution?

- wear supportive shoes
- stretch/foam roll/massage the foot and calf
- wear a stretching sleep sock

I don't know about you, but the sleep sock sure looks sexy to me:

Anyway.

I've found on the days where I do my stretching or rolling I feel much better the next morning.  So I'm trying to keep up with that to begin with, and may progress to the sexy sock if things don't start improving.  Right now my top activities include:

Step standing

Foot stretching

Golf/tennis ball rolling

I'm not being very scientific about this either - just doing all of the above on repeat, whenever I think of doing it.  Plus scrunching up and releasing my toes a lot (think of the motion you make when you pick something up off the floor with your toes).  It seems to be helping, but I'm not totally healed.

Regardless, I'm just hoping I can figure this out and get over it so that I don't have yet ANOTHER reason that allows me to mentally check out of running.

Wish me luck.

PS - have you had this issue before?  What helped you?  Comment below...