visit to the doctor

I went to see this doctor on Monday to get another opinion on my foot issues.

"The Director of the Clinic is Dr. Michael Fredericson, a former collegiate distance runner, and one of the leading national authorities on running medicine. For the past 18 years, Dr. Fredericson has been the team doctor caring for the Stanford track & field teams, a national team physician with USA track & field, and on the Scientific Advisory Board for Runner’s World Magazine. He has been at the forefront of the study of overuse injuries in runners and has published over 75 scientific articles, 15 book chapters, and 1 book related to these efforts."

So I figured with those credentials, if anyone could give me any new solutions, it would be him. Sadly however, I was just told the same things I've been told before by other doctors.
- With my feet, I have a not-very-high upper limit of how much mileage I can run.
- I should not aspire to run marathons or even half-marathons.
- I will likely develop any or all of the following: shin splints, stress fractures, posterior tibial tendonitis, achilles tendonitis, and plantar faciitis. Hm, I'm about 3.5 out of 5 right now. I say 3.5 because I've had achilles problems before but not full-blown tendonitis.

I also asked what he thought about minimalist running shoes, and he replied that it's a good idea for the right person, but not someone with feet like me.

But, I did get two things out of the appointment (which I had to wait 1.5 hours for, and really stressed me out because it happened to be my first full-time day at work) to make it worth it:
- A prescription for physical therapy. Unfortunately, I will probably put this off because I don't want to spare the time right now.
- A prescription for new orthotics and the name of a guy who specializes in orthotics (and prosthetics!).

So basically he just said to me "You should train for 10k's". The thing is while you don't have to run as much to prepare for a shorter race, more of what you run should be actual workouts as opposed to just running at whatever pace you feel like. Speed workouts = lactic acid building up in legs, bursting lungs, heart racing, getting really hot and sweaty. Definitely not as relaxing. The other thing is, when you tell people that you run, they automatically assume that your ultimate goal is to do a marathon, and that doing a shorter race is somehow less difficult of a feat than doing a marathon, because hey, anyone could run 3 miles. Um, tell that to the Olympics or USATF.

Anyway. After my second full-time day at work I am still adjusting and feel like a chicken running around with its head cut off. Between meetings and pumping twice a day I hardly ever get a solid block of time to just sit at my desk and WORK. Plus I was just given some extra stuff to take on at work. Plus the doctor's visit yesterday and having to run an errand to the orthodontist today threw things off both days.