Today on the Doc On The Run Podcast, we’re talking with Andrea, and she just ran the Tokyo Marathon in three hours and nine minutes.
I know for most people, they’re going to think, “Wow, that’s really fast. That’s pretty impressive.” But what’s really impressive is that she actually did it with a calcaneal stress fracture. And in case you don’t know what that is, the calcaneus is a fancy word for heel bone. And so she actually got a stress fracture in her heel bone. She was told she couldn’t run. She did a whole bunch of stuff to figure out how she could run, and she went to Tokyo and finished the sixth of the world major marathons.
So we’re fortunate enough to have her here. I think her story is going to be really helpful to any of you that have an injury, you’re told you can’t run, or you think you can’t run, but instead of thinking whether or not you can run, you should be thinking about how you can run. And she has been really generous with her time to come here and actually share her story with all of us.
Dr. Chris Segler:
Andrea, thanks for being here today. Really grateful you could be on the show, and come just share your story.
Andrea:
Thank you, Chris. Very happy to be here and share my story.
Dr. Chris Segler:
All right. So now let’s just get right into it. So obviously as I mentioned in the intro, you were doing Tokyo recently as the last of the six major world marathons, right?
So just by that description, we know you’ve been running a long time, but how long have you been running? When did you start running?
Andrea:
“Listen to the full podcast interview to hear Andrea’s answer.”
Dr. Chris Segler:
Wow. Okay. So you’ve been running for 10 years, right?
And that’s great. And so when was your first marathon? What race did you do?
Andrea:
“Listen to the full podcast interview to hear Andrea’s answer.”
Dr. Chris Segler:
Okay. And so why did you decide to start running marathons? What was your sort of motivation for that?
Andrea:
“Listen to the full podcast interview to hear Andrea’s answer.”
Dr. Chris Segler:
All right. So during all that time, during this 10-year period from when you started learning about marathons, you make some mistakes, which of course we all do, we all make mistakes when we first do marathons, and you’re nervous, and you always think there’s some secret weapon or something, so you change something at the last minute. All kinds of things that can be mistakes. But obviously you continued to improve and continued to do marathons. And I’m curious if during that 10-year period, basically, prior to this recent injury, did you ever have any over-training injuries? Did you get any other injuries in the past?
Andrea:
“Listen to the full podcast interview to hear Andrea’s answer.”
Dr. Chris Segler:
Yeah. No, that’s great. So you mentioned something interesting, though, that you got a hamstring injury, and you felt like you came back too fast from that. And when you say you came back too fast after that injury, what do you mean? Did you just resume too much volume in your training, or did you start running sooner than you maybe should have? Or if you went back, what would you do differently?
Andrea:
“Listen to the full podcast interview to hear Andrea’s answer.”
Dr. Chris Segler:
Yeah. That’s great. So it’s not about the timeline, it’s about how it feels, more than anything else. And literally every single day, I get questions from runners who will say, “I have some specific injury.” It could be a stress fracture, it could be a tendonitis thing, it could be any kind of injury. And they’ll say, “How long?” I say, “I don’t know.”
And they get very frustrated by that. So it’s not just a specific timeline because you’re a runner, it’s a specific timeline because of the way your body’s responding to it, and you have to listen to that.
But it’s good that you’re going to survive that.
Andrea:
“Listen to the full podcast interview to hear Andrea’s answer.”
Dr. Chris Segler:
That’s right. Yeah. That’s a good point. And you said that six weeks number, and that’s a number that’s often thrown around by doctors. And when I lecture on stress fractures at medical conferences, I have a slide in my talk that actually has a quote from a large meta-analysis, a huge study of stress fractures in runners, and it said that the average return to sport time, the time they actually returned to running, ranged from four to 52 weeks. That’s a month to a year. And yet doctors want to say, “Well, just take six weeks off.” So if you use that number, you know that for the people that could be healed in four weeks, six weeks is too long. And for the people that would take 52 weeks, six weeks is way too short.
So it’s a little absurd that I mean, and I understand why we want it. Everybody wants to know what’s going to happen, and it’s really hard to just wait and see. When you’re a runner, and you have a thing like the Tokyo Marathon on the calendar, where it’s an expensive trip, obviously it’s a big ordeal to get there, it’s hard to get into the race anyway, but you had that planned, right? So the Tokyo was the last of the six major marathons, and so for the people because I was actually just, I guess a week ago or so, I was lecturing at a medical conference, and I mentioned your case, and was explaining that that day, you were going to go run the Tokyo Marathon with a calcaneal stress fracture. And somebody in the audience asked me, “What are the chances she is not going to do well?” And I said, “I’ll bet you a million dollars she finishes and she doesn’t break it.” But that’s because we had a lot of discussions about it. It doesn’t mean that you can go run just because I said that you could.
So for people listening, that is not advice to go run without figuring out what’s going on. That’s different. But what was interesting to me is that lots of doctors in the audience had actually no idea what the six world major marathons were. So why don’t you, for those of us listening who don’t know what that is, why don’t you go ahead and just explain what the six majors is?
Andrea:
“Listen to the full podcast interview to hear Andrea’s answer.”
Dr. Chris Segler:
Okay. So you had done all five of them, all of them except for Tokyo up until recently.
So all of that was going well, you’ve done five out of six, and then shortly before this, just a few weeks before, you started having pain. What happened?
Andrea:
“Listen to the full podcast interview to hear Andrea’s answer.”
Dr. Chris Segler:
Okay. So for everybody listening, plantar fasciitis is the most common condition that affects not only runners, everybody. And the plantar fascia is a huge ligament on the bottom of your foot. It attaches to the heel, and because it attaches to the heel, sometimes people that get a calcaneal stress fracture will think they have plantar fasciitis. Plantar fasciitis is actually, makes up 40% of all visits to podiatrists in the United States. That’s almost half. So it’s very, very common. But because of that, unfortunately, when you start having heel pain, if you just do a search online, you’ll almost always find most of what you find is about plantar fasciitis.
And so I actually wrote the book on runner’s heel pain, explaining self-diagnosis and self-treatment, but this is the whole point of the book, is to explain what these other conditions are, and how you can tell the difference. But the first thing is, as soon as Andrea told me, “Well, I couldn’t walk. I couldn’t bear weight,” that’s never plantar fasciitis. That is always something different, but there’s so much information about plantar fasciitis, it’s really easy to think that, “Well, this is just a bad case of plantar fasciitis or something.” So you couldn’t really walk around. You were having pain. And then what did you decide to do? Because obviously you were not going to be able to go for your long run. You couldn’t even walk, right?
So what did you do right away?
Andrea:
“Listen to the full podcast interview to hear Andrea’s answer.”
Dr. Chris Segler::
Okay. Yeah. So when was that? How close to the Tokyo Marathon was that MRI where you were told you had this five-millimeter crack in the bone?
Andrea:
“Listen to the full podcast interview to hear Andrea’s answer.”
Dr. Chris Segler:
Yeah. That’s not good. So what did your doctor say? So the doctor that did the MRI looked at your MRI, and it was two and a half weeks before the Tokyo Marathon.
And what did the doctor tell you?
Andrea:
“Listen to the full podcast interview to hear Andrea’s answer.”
Dr. Chris Segler:
What happened when we got on a webcam call and tried to work through whether or not you
could run? What was different from the advice you got from the previous doctor?
Andrea:
“Listen to the full podcast interview to hear Andrea’s answer.”
Dr. Chris Segler:
How hard was it to be restrained, use crutches and stick with the plan all the way to Tokyo?
Andrea:
“Listen to the full podcast interview to hear Andrea’s answer.”
Dr. Chris Segler:
Tell us about race day in Tokyo.
Andrea:
“Listen to the full podcast interview to hear Andrea’s answer.”
Dr. Chris Segler:
I have to imagine that achieving a goal like that was really emotional. What was the finish like?
Andrea:
“Listen to the full podcast interview to hear Andrea’s answer.”
Dr. Chris Segler:
What is next for you, Andrea?
Andrea:
“Listen to the full podcast interview to hear Andrea’s answer.”
I think everybody should check out your Instagram, and to all of you listening right now should
go follow Andrea on Instagram. We’ll have all the link in the show notes episode under the
podcast section at DocOnTheRun.com. And if anybody is trying to figure out how they can,
follow you, connect with you, or reach out to you directly, how can they best connect with you?
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