What is the number one most important action you can take when you roll your ankle running? Well, that is what we’re talking about today on the Doc On The Run Podcast.
Rolling your ankle is very very common and I often help runners who have rolled their ankle and then they are trying to get back to running or figure out if they really did anything bad like break something.
If you think it is no big deal when you roll your ankle you might be right and you might be wrong. In fact, you are probably wrong, you think it is no big deal. Well, there is a problem, and the biggest problem is that when you roll your ankle, a couple things happen.
Number one is that you get sort of what could be described as very mild numbness around your ankle to protect you from the discomfort of the injury. That inhibits what we call proprioception or your ability to tell the position of your foot or your hand or your thumb or whatever in space.
I can close my eyes and I know that that is left and that is right or vice versa depending on how you are looking at the camera, but I know the position because my brain’s telling me so. But when you are running and you roll your ankle and it starts to swell and you have this protective mechanism in place, you can’t really tell where your foot is so well.
So, guess what that means? That means you are at very very high risk of re-spraining your ankle right away. Now, you might want to write down the date and time because this is probably the only time you’ll ever hear me say it. This is over 900 episodes I have done, and this may be the first time you hear me say you should stop running. I’m always telling runners to figure out how to keep running but this is the one time you may want to just stop running. I’ll give you a real good example.
There is a woman I have seen a number of times for different injuries. She’s a very accomplished ultra marathoner. Well, she was doing a run in the Marin Headlands and I have run on this trail and I know this trail and I know that when you are coming over the Marin Headlands and down toward the Golden Gate Bridge it is very windy, it is very irregular and it gets dark pretty quickly because there’s a mountain on the side of you. So as the sun starts to set it becomes really hard to see where you are going.
Well, shocker. She rolled her ankle, and she said, I just rolled my ankle it is not that big of a deal so I kept running. Well, two miles later she rolled it again. That time worse and she heard a pop or a crack or something. This is not good. So, the thing is, is what she should have done the first time is she should have stopped running. But I understand where she was coming from. She was not that far from her car. She didn’t have that far to go and it was going to get dark and she didn’t want to get caught in the dark. But it got worse.
She actually did. Turns out I went to see her. She called me. I went to see her that evening. On Sunday night she called me and I got my ultrasound. I was looking at it and she said what do you think Chris, do you think it might be broken? I was like not maybe, it is definitely broken. And then we got x-rays to see how bad it was displaced or how bad it really was to see how big the gap was, if it was angulated all that which you can’t really see with let’s say confidence on an ultrasound and it was definitely broken. If she just stopped running when she rolled her ankle that would not have happened.
I know that you always think it is not that big of a deal and I know you are always thinking about all this other stuff, you got to get home , know you got to take care of the kids, you got to put them to bed, you have work things you have to do, whatever. But if you run on an ankle and you roll your ankle and you crack the fifth metatarsal base and you keep running, you can displace it, it opens up, it gets a bigger crack and then it might need surgery, or it could take a whole lot longer to heal. When you roll your ankle don’t dismiss it right away because it is high risk for serious big trouble that can really keep you off of running.
If you roll your ankle and you still have pain, and you are still running on it you might want to check out the ankle pain masterclass. That is where I do a deep dive into the strategies that I use with runners that have these kinds of injuries and want to get back to running as quickly as possible.
For full disclosure only a couple of months after that woman actually rolled her ankle like that, she ran a half marathon in Moab and not longer than that she ran a 50 mile race. Way sooner because I just presented her case when I was talking about this at the International Foot and Ankle Foundation, and I used her as an example, and I asked them if the doctors in the audience they thought it’d be okay for her to use two races everyone said no but she did them both successfully and no more problems with that fifth metatarsal.
Those strategies I use with her they are in the ankle pain master class too. www.docontherun.com/anklepainmasterclass. Go check it out. I’ll see you in the training and thanks for watching. Share this episode with somebody if you think they need to hear it. See you next time.
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