What exactly is a shin splint, and why does it have that weird name? Despite six months of living with one, I can't tell you. The shin part makes sense - it's an injury of the shin. But splint? I dunno. The real name is "medial tibial stress syndrome", so I guess I shouldn't worry about the nonsensical common name.
In any case, as I have written previously, during last summer's vacation to the Southwest I was frustrated with an itinerary which kept us all too sedentary, and so the morning after we arrived home I went out for a run, and afterwards something didn't feel right. My run, in addition to relieving my frustration at not having exercised enough for two weeks, apparently injured my leg.
I didn't think too much of it at first - by the time you're in your sixties, everything hurts at least sometimes. The pain was intermittent, and not too bad. As a precaution I did cut out running, but I didn't cut back on any other activities - in fact, when a month later I went on my annual kayak camping trip, I did a rather strenuous hike up Ampersand Mountain (though because of the pain I did use trekking poles on the hike).
In my experience, this sort of injury slowly heals on its own, but in this case the pain worsened over time. Quoting the Mayo Clinic website, "At first, the pain might stop when you stop exercising. Eventually, however, the pain can be continuous and might progress to a stress reaction or stress fracture." Yeah, it got to be continuous; it hurt event to walk. Eventually, in early October (on the same day I made an unscheduled trip to the dentist because of a broken crown, and a scheduled trip to the dermatologist to check for more skin cancer - ah, the joys of aging), I went to see an orthopedist. An X-ray showed nothing, which, because they're orthopedists, to them meant maybe I had a stress fracture in my leg too fine to be detected by an X-ray. So they put me in a surgical boot for a month - lacking a firm diagnosis, this was just sort of the default treatment option for my circumstance. I was allowed to continue doing non-weight-bearing, low impact exercise, which led to some comical situations. The folks in the car parked next to mine at the Great Pumpkin bike ride Halloween weekend were surprised when I limped out of my car, traded my surgical boot for a cycling shoe, pulled my bike out of the back of my car, and rode off.
After a month of immobilizing my leg in the surgical boot I had all sorts of new pains in my foot and ankle, but the tibia pain was a little better. Maybe. In early November I started going to physical therapy. AI once again felt like I was getting default treatment plan since I didn't really have a diagnosis. Still, twice every week I'd go for PT, and I'd zealously do all my exercises at home. Thanksgiving weekend - between doing a lot of running around setting up for Thanksgiving dinner and a lot of walking on Black Friday (along with, ahem, trying to jog for a couple of minutes during one of my doctor-approved walks), my leg started to really hurt again, and I worried that I had reinjured myself; however, at PT the following Monday the therapist reassured me that it was just flare-up from being too active, and would settle down in a few days, which it did.
At my follow-up visit on December 13th (now four months after my initial injury) the Physician Assistant was a little concerned that the site of the injury was still tender and that I was making only slow progress toward healing, and sent me for an MRI, which revealed nothing but edema (swelling) in the area. In other words, I had a shin splint. Best of all, she lifted my restrictions and said I could start experimenting with a little running following their return-to-run protocol, but that I should run only on softer surfaces like a running track or treadmill. This was good news, since on my own I had already decided to start on the return-to-run program, mixing one minute jogs with my walks (9 minutes walking, one minute jogging). The following week I saw the doctor, who reviewed the MRI results and concurred - and also recommended OrangeTheory fitness classes, a path I haven't yet explored.
Maybe there's something to mind over matter, because after the MRI revealed that what I had was shin splints - not anything more serious (in one of my earlier visits they had even hinted at the possibility of bone cancer), my recovery accelerated. I'm still progressing methodically through the return-to-run program. On my most recent outing I did three cycles of jogging 8 minutes and walking two - and within the jogging I even threw in a couple of brief (less than a minute) intervals of all-out running. Two more increments and I'll be back to being able to do a run with no walking breaks!
So, I'm on the mend - though from what, I'm still not sure. Shin splint, I guess.
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