Torn Achilles Tendon

Nausea. dizziness, bleeding nipples: Why would anyone run a marathon?

Nausea. Dizziness. Dehydration. Cardiac arrest. Torn Achilles tendons. Shin splints. Stress fractures. Groin strains. Calf strains. Dislocated kneecaps. Plantar fasciitis. Plica syndrome. Pulled hamstrings. The possibility of losing control of your bodily functions and experiencing what the running community euphemistically refers to as a G.I. incident. Bleeding nipples. The chance, however, slight, that the exertion may literally kill you.

Considering the physical toll, and the damage running 42.2 kilometres can do to the body both in the short and long term, it’s fair to ask, why would anyone in their right mind want to run a marathon?

Yet more and more people are putting themselves through such agony. Races have proliferated to the degree that they now clog the calendar. In Canada’s biggest city, for instance, the GoodLife Fitness Toronto Marathon agreed to move from the fall to the spring since it was too close to the Scotiabank Toronto Waterfront Marathon; its new date now overlaps with the Mississauga Marathon.

South of the border, more than half a million people finished a marathon last year, an 8.6-per-cent increase over 2009, which saw a nearly 10-per-cent increase over the previous year, according to Running USA. While no organization tracks such figures in Canada, most large events have seen steady gains over the past decade, and the growing number of races held each year is proof that more people are increasingly going the distance.

“The growth curve is very steady,” says Alex Coffin, founder of MarathonCanada.com, a site devoted to promoting marathon running in Canada. “If you’re [organizing] an event, trying to create a niche for yourself, basically the only time left is in the dead of the winter or the middle of the summer.”

The cliché may be that marathon runners are goal-oriented, Type-A personalities, but all the people participating in events can’t all fit that profile. While plenty are still driven by competing, many more simply want to complete the race.

“Especially now that you have the walk-run type training program, where that’s very acceptable, it’s opened itself up to the full spectrum. You still have the A type who’s concerned with what his or her time is and how that relates to their age group and all that, but you get a lot of people [for whom] it’s all about the medal,” you receive upon completion, Mr. Coffin says.

Torn Achilles Tendon, Heal Fast or Heal Slow After Achilles Tendon ...

Torn Achilles Tendon
How Fast Do You Want To Heal?

All right, you have a Torn Achilles Tendon . Meaning, you have a small or large tear, but not a complete tear, which technically is an Achilles Tendon Rupture.

How fast to you want your Achilles to heal? You have some options.

First you look at the reality of the situation, understand the mechanics, and then make your best choices for how to get back to being active on your feet again.

Achilles tendons tear all the time. It limits a lot of people Athletes and people with active jobs will be most effected, and most motivated to heal, and heal fast.

The question is, if you tore your Achilles Tendon, how motivated are you to heal?

Tendon Tears happen for one and only one very simple reason.

Your muscles weren't firing how they're supposed to be firing, so they couldn't absorb force, and all that force goes -somewhere-. It went to your tendon, and your tendon tore.

There are a lot of variables, sure. Maybe you had pre-existing Tendonitis and/or Tendonosis .

Hopefully you didn't have Levaquin Tendonitis , because that's a TOTALLY different conversation.

But for sure, your muscles were TOO TIGHT, your connective tissue was too tight. Predictably you had some previous injury big or small and developed compensation pattern and electrical disruption in your musculature system.

This all combines to keep your muscle from absorbing force. Like a shock absorber, muscles are supposed to perform work and provide bounce, basically.

If that's not happening, then force transfers to your tendon, and tendons are not designed for that.

So you did whatever you did, which may have been athletic or just walking up the stairs or down the street, and you you suddenly got a Torn Achilles Tendon .

This can also slowly happen over time, getting worse and worse. In this case you have all the same Downward Spiral mechanism of Pain Causing Dynamic .

There's nothing mysterious about torn Achilles tendons. It's a predictable mechanism once a tear happens. Unfortunately there's no way to predict -when- an achilles tendon will tear.