How to get rid of sore calves from running - get lateral
I think I have got rid of the soreness in my calves. An odd solution that is more about the mechanics of change rather than being about stopping your calves hurting, but you never know.
My calves have been aching for about a year. They started aching at one time, roughly when three things changed.
- Started running interval sessions in a focused way.
- First ever sand dune session.
- More stretching with particular attention to the two different calf muscles.
Since then the calves have been tight or sore, quite a lot of the time and it has got a lot worse recently, but now, fingers crossed that it lasts, the worst of it has gone. So what happened to make it go away.
After the sand dune session it was the worst, hence the stretching to try and ease it. Ten months later without a lot of success I started thinking laterally and looking for other things to try. Einstein inspired this with his definition of madness as doing the same thing again and again and expecting to get a different result. So now I am just trying different things to see if it makes a difference and one of things I tried was about how my desk was arranged. I have a foot stool under it so I can sit with my legs stretched out. So I took the stool away to see if that would help. And the calves got worse, quite a lot worse. It appears that that was because now I was sitting with my feet under my chair pressing down on my toes, and doing that for a long time each day. The result of that was stretching the calves for about 5 hours a day, no wonder they were sore. So have changed my seating position and within 3 days calves are feeling normal again.
This change was about being motivated to change (I just didn't want sore calves), then believing that the new behaviour accomplished what I wanted it to (tried it out and saw the results that it gave), then breaking the habit of the old behaviour (set my organiser to give me an hourly reminder to sit in a nuetral position).
To summarise:
For running - if you have got sore calves and you spend a long time sitting at a desk in a position that strains your calves then it could be worth changing your sitting position.
For change - if you are looking for the cause of something, you might find it in the most unexpected place, so start with the obvious, but if that doesn't work then look else where, a bit of lateral thinking.
