My left achilles tendon has been the biggest source of trouble in my entire athletics career, and by early July I was once again at a decisive point as far as the severety of the injury was concerned. There was a lot of inflammation around my left heel, and even just walking around hurt my foot. This was obviously the direct consequence of climbing 4000m of elevation over the course of 4 days in Chamonix in late June; but in general the previous months had seen a gradual worsening of the situation even though I’d already decreased my training volume and intensity.
Thankfully, I had already made an appointment with a doctor specializing in sports medicine; who on July 7th diagnosed a Haglund’s deformity. We initially agreed that I would try to maintain a certain level of training volume, so I still did a couple of runs in the easy 5-6km range throughout the next week; but these runs merely confirmed that the achilles definitely wasn’t going to get better if I kept subjecting it to impact forces. My last running activity for July was on the 16th, a simple 2km warm-up that was quite painful.
On my second appointment on July 24th, we decided instead that as long as the achilles didn’t improve, I’d keep not running; which of course meant that I would not be able to compete at the Red Bull 400 in late August.
Obviously, all of this had quite an impact on the type and quality of trainings I was able to do all throughout July: