Achilles Tendon Rupture Recovery

Happy Thanksgiving! I hope you had a wonderful day full of delicious food, surrounded by family and friends.
Although this has nothing to do with Achilles, here’s a NYTimes article that I found interesting. Enjoy! (Don’t pay too much attention to the first couple of pages, but the last page is gold!)


http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/25/garden/25clean.html?pagewanted=1&ref=realestate

Hello everyone! Although I check AchillesBlog just about every day, it’s been a while since I last posted. So here’s my long overdue update.

I am happy to say that my recovering Achilles has been doing well. When I am running or playing basketball, I don’t really think about my left Achilles anymore.
The right Achilles becomes tender if I play basketball a little too often, but now days, I can’t give it my 100% because of my knee and so I don’t really stress my Achilles too much.

As I mentioned in my previous posts, it’s really my right knee that’s been on my mind. I went to physical therapy for a few weeks, and now I am doing leg exercises on my own to strengthen the muscles around my knee.

I must say that finding a good physical therapist takes more effort than what I put in to find my current (now former) PT. What I did was basically find the nearest PT center near work that accepted my health insurance, and off I went. In the end, I felt that the physical therapist was too busy with too many patients. I didn’t feel like I received the necessary guidance on the exercises and attention to my condition. There are some good guidelines on AchillesBlog on finding the right physical therapist, and I’ll definitely do a bit more research next time.

I am glad to see that people continue to visit AchilleBlog to support each other during their recovery, and so far, there are over 860 people who have filled out their AchillesBlog profile.

Some time ago, because of the spam blogs, I changed the blog registration so that it’s a manual process. I know that this isn’t a perfect system, and if I find a better spam check for automated registrations, I’ll change it back so that it’s a completely automated system.

There has been some minor changes to Achilles Profile widget. Instead of ‘123 weeks and 5 days since Post-OP’, it now says: ‘123 weeks and 5 days Since start of treatment’. This is so that we can accommodate people who are recovering via non-surgical treatment.

Norm had made this suggestion before, and I finally got around to making this change. If there are other suggestions on making the site better, please chime in. I’ll do what I can.

Well, those starting out in their ATR recovery, I hope you found a good support system here. We can all relate to most of what you are going through. For some reason, I found comfort in talking to others who really could relate to exactly what I was going through at exactly the same time, even more than talking to my closest friends or family members.
I also found hope in seeing others recover close to 100% from this injury.

So those of you who haven’t posted in a while, please chime in and fill us in on how you are doing!

I can’t believe that I passed my 2nd year ATR anniversary without even noticing. I ruptured my left Achilles playing basketball Feb 8th 2008, and I let Feb 8th 2010 slip by without any mention of my ATR to anyone.

Doc Ross, thanks for writing about your 2nd year anniversary! That led me to wonder about my ATR anniversary.
I didn’t even remember my ATR date, so I had to look it up on my Achilles Profile and read my very first post:
http://achillesblog.com/dennis/2008/02/08/hello-world/#more-1

How the time flies, and how things have changed so much..

Just a few minutes ago, I submitted my guaranteed application for the NYC Marathon, and paid the entry fee. (By the way, I haven’t been training very much, as it’s way too cold to be running.. and after much research, I don’t think I am going to shoot for the 3 hr Marathon.

So how does my recovering Achilles feel? Well, it’s still thicker and sometimes feel a little sore. But I feel like it’s stronger than my right Achilles, which I have a bit of tendinosis from all the bball I am playing. I probably won’t stop playing bball though as long as I am healthy.

Am I scared of re-rupture or rupture of my right Achilles? No, and maybe a little. However, it definitely won’t keep me from playing bball. I’ll be a little lazy on defense, won’t cut to the basket as hard, and settle for a jumper instead of driving hard to the basket. But stop playing..? definitely not.

It still amazes me that there have been well over 650 people (not counting the people who didn’t register to fill out their Achilles Profile) on AchillesBlog. It started with just a few of us: Tom, Doc Ross, Brendan, Jim, Johnskier, and others.. and I am happy to see that we keep coming back to check up on each other, and that the site is still a good haven/resource for the ‘newly recovering’.

AchillesBloggers, stay strong, stay patient, and stay positive. god bless.

I ran the 4 mile, The Race to Deliver in Central Park this past Sunday.  This was my 9th race of the year, and I’ve already received my volunteer credit from the NY Road Runner’s club.  So, I can happily say that I’ve reached my goal of qualifying for the 2010 NYC Marathon.  So one  milestone reached, many more to go.

I am excited about the prospect of running the marathon again, but I am a little disappointed that I haven’t been as consistent with running as I would have liked this year.  My pace has been around 8-9 minutes a mile at these races, and that’s not exactly where I wanted to be.  But I guess life is like that sometimes: some successes, some disappointments.  You keep trying, and you aim for more successes  and try to minimize the disappointments.

One of my friends trained hard for about 8 months and was able to run the marathon in around 3 hours, and I’d like to get there as well by next October.  I ran my first marathon at a little over 4 hour mark, so if I complete my 2nd marathon in under 3 hrs, then that would really be amazing.

It seems impossible right now, and those of you who are avid runners may agree that it’s impossible.  Well, let’s see.. I have a lot of work ahead of me.  I have about 11 months to train.

I’ll keep you posted on my training and everything that I learn along the way.  In addition to training, I have a lot of research ahead of me.   This site seems like a good starting point: http://www.sub3hour.com/

I have to be lucky too and stay injury free.  The one roadblock I see is not my Achilles, but my right knee.  As long as my right knee holds up, I am confident that I can do it.

I wish you all a speedy recovery!

My update is long overdue, so here it is!

I’ve been running every so often, and I now play basketball about twice a week. I am happy to say that my recovering Achilles feels pretty good. What has attention now is my right knee that bothers me when I play basketball, but it’s been manageable. I just can’t do the things that I used to be able to a few years ago. What a surprise.. oh well.

This past week, I played basketball 3 days and ran one day about 5 miles. I haven’t been running very consistently, and I plan on changing that. I’d like to run about 2-3 times a week, play basketball about twice a week and lift weights daily. Okay, maybe lifting weights daily is being a bit too optimistic.

Comparing my recovering Achilles from the 1 year mark to now (about 1 year and 9 months), I can definitely say that it has improved. It feels more “comfortable”, and it doesn’t feel so stiff in the mornings. It used to feel “off”, something uncomfortable about it, and it doesn’t feel like that any more. So I am hopeful that it’ll continually get better.

So I tried a new free application on my iphone called imapmyrun, which uses the iphone’s GPS to track the your running route, pace, distance, etc. So here’s what the data looks like when I used it to run 5.1 miles in Central Park this past Sunday late afternoon:

Date: 10/25/2009
Start: 17:04:23
End: 17:49:57
Time Taken: 00:45:34
Total Distance: 7.88 mi.
Pace: 05:47 (avg)
Speed: 10.37 (mi/hr) (avg)

As you can see, it’s not perfect.. The GPS data isn’t the most accurate, even in Central Park where there really aren’t any tall buildings to obstruct the GPS signal. Okay maybe some trees, but that’s about it. I actually ran around 5.1 miles, not 7.88 miles, in a leisurely pace, which means that I didn’t run 5:47 per mile, but rather 8 to 9 min per mile. Anyway, it’s still pretty neat that we can do things like this on a phone. Hopefully the accuracy will improve in the future.

So I think I have one more NYRR run to complete, and then I am guaranteed entry to 2010 NYC marathon. I am really looking forward to both getting the guaranteed entry, and running the marathon next year. I plan on training hard and beating my time from when I ran it in 2001, hopefully by a significant margin.

So, I wish everyone a speedy and steady recovery without any twists and turns, but as other ahead of me told me, just be patient. Thanks guys!