CrossFit Open 2017 Finished – RXed Every Work Out!
Alright, so since I got my 25 DUs in a row LAST Sunday (as in, 10 days ago or whatever, May 12th Sunday) I have had intermittent yet excruciating pain just on the inside of my shins where the bones meet my calf muscles. Diagram!
See where my circle and X are? That’s where it fucking hurts. I have determined that it’s the way that I land on the ball of my foot/toes when I do DU type jumping. This also started to happen when I’ve gone running (the second I take my first step to run, I feel it). Fortunately, when I’m running, it loosens up enough and subsides throughout the run, until I’m done, and then they wind up again and are just on fire.
Box jumps aggravated it, but the real aggravator (not a real word apparently, but you know what I mean?) was when we did the 400m skip around the block on Bring a Friend Day (May 14th).
DUs again that week didn’t help, and then running this past weekend along with more DU practice didn’t help either.
So.. this brings us to today. We did a 400m run for a warm up and it was instantaneous. The pain shot through my shins/calves (not shin splints!) from the first step I took. They loosened up a little and I was able to complete my run, but the WOD was the real kicker. Even through the rest of the warm up, I was walking very tenderly. It was definitely hurting with every step. Keeping my foot flexed seemed to make it worse.
Our WOD today was a 20 min EMOM
calorie row for 1 min
lateral bounds for 1 min
(rotate every minute for 20 min)
I got through my first and second sets of the lateral bounds, which is literally just jumping over a 20″ height over and over, and counting your reps, and the pain was almost unbearable. The rowing helped it to subside, but actually, the rowing probably contributed to it just as much, as my feet are flexed to the max when I row.
I tried doing a couple different modifications, but the pain didnt go away, so I said fuck it and finished the workout with the RX movement. Here’s what they look like, except we used a PVC pipe on top of a 20″ box, and not the parallets.
I soon realized it was the landing and not so much the jumping that was causing the pain. When we finished, I tried doing everything to stretch out those muscles, but the only thing that seemed to work initially was kneeling down as hard as I could (sounds stupid) to force my calves to stretch as much as possible. I then took a lacrosse ball and rolled it over the sore spots (see first diagram) to try and work out those muscles. Now THAT hurt like hell.
When I got home, I rolled my capris up and stuck my feet in our non-heated pool, letting the water go up to my knees. The cold water felt so good on them, and by the time I got out, I was feeling soo much better. Literally, within 5-10 min after that, the pain was gone.
Right now, there’s no pain, but I can tell that those muscles are tender. If I were to jump rope again, or skip, or do anything where I was pulling my feet up like that and landing on my toes, it’ll come right back. Each step I take is with care. So frustrating because every time I think I’m doing better, I’ll do the movement that aggravates it and it’ll come right back as searing pain. 🙁
OH. I finished my WOD with 198 reps/calories total. Wish I had done more, but considering the muscle pain, I’m just glad I was able to Rx it and finish.
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