Universal pain in the ... foot

We decided to go on this trip because it was a better alternative than sitting around Mother’s Day at home upset. It was a great idea. The trip was awesome. Normally I can find something bad about any trip to Disney or Universal but I really have no complaints. Weather was great, lines weren’t too long, nothing dramatic happened like getting in a car accident. Overall it was simply a really good weekend with my family.

My family is all about food just like me (in case you couldn’t tell since I always talk about food). I tried to keep my actual meals somewhat healthy in an effort to make up for the other stuff I ate. I think every single meal after polishing off my plate I would eat the leftovers off my family’s plates. My “other stuff” included butter beer (yum), Ghirardelli brownie sundae (drooling thinking about it yum), a big cupcake (not that yum but I ate the whole thing anyway) and we shared a giant doughnut from Simpsons (actually really yum!). The extent of my self-control was not buying a whole doughnut to take home like rest of my family did. And I’m glad for that decision because I somehow gained more pounds than days I was away. Given it wasn’t a cruise I don’t know how that happened but whatever.

My only complaint was my foot. While walking to the park the first day my foot started to hurt and it got progressively worse during the day. These were long days where it was mostly walking or standing. By the end of the day I was limping. The next day was pretty much the same thing. The third day it was a little better and luckily that day involved less walking and we found a guy with a bicycle attached to a cart to ride us from the hotel to the park. I was tempted to ask if I could pedal instead because I was feeling lazy from lack of training. Normally in this situation it would have been a few days of only running and strength training. Being I couldn’t run, I did strength once and the other two days only walked 10+ miles around the parks. It’s really frustrating not being able to run in the first place but even worse when there is a new fun place to explore on foot.

After seeing the two PTs last week I have an idea of some of the many issues going on in my body that could be causing my injuries. However as of yesterday I’m really convinced the foot pain is steaming from cycling, and running (and apparently walking) amplifies the issue. After not running AT ALL for a week and pretty much no running the few weeks before, it’s odd that this foot problem has come up. Why I’m officially convinced it’s cycling related is after a power test yesterday, the same spot on the outside of my foot started bothering me on the other foot. So based on that and the fact that now the tops of my knees are also hurting which I know is from cycling, it’s officially time to bite the bullet and get an official bike fit. Although my previous injuries I know were caused by running and I know I have a lot of work to do to prevent further running injuries, I’ll be really annoyed if the thing preventing me from running right now is actually from cycling and it took me this long to figure it out. But on the other hand I’m just happy that I’m finally starting to figure things out and I know what I need to do. Who knows, I could be completely wrong with this theory though.