You know that's a bad sign. There's pretty much only one reason runners look up muscles on the internet... it hurts.
My most searched post ever on this blog is the one about your soleus muscle.
Anyway, here's a fun picture of the posterior tibialis:
(copied from Wikipedia.)
If you look closely at that picture (the posterior tibialis is in red), you'll see that in the upper part of your calf, it's under some other muscles (including my good friend, the soleus), but you can see that eventually it stretches down and toward the inside of your arch, where it becomes the posterior tibialis tendon, and is pretty much the key muscle in supporting your arch, and in plantar flexing and inverting your foot in general.
I seem to be prone to calf problems and I know it. Every time something in my calf hurts, I swear that I'm going to work on doing little strengthening exercises (like calf raises) year round. In fact, I think I even promised myself several years ago that I'd add them to my routine permanently. And then the pain goes away, I keep up the calf raises for a couple weeks, then they fall by the way side again. Until the next time my calf hurts.
So my calf injury history:
In Sept. 2007, about two weeks before the Chicago marathon, I had an injury in my gastrocnemius.
In the summer 2010, it was plantar fasciitis (starting with sore feet for my very first post on this blog, deciding to go to the doc, and then recovering, and really recovering (including what I did to get over it) a few months later).
In the fall 2010, it was general calf pain, thought to be my gastroc again.
In winter 2010-2011, it was biceps femoris pain.
In early 2011, it was hamstrings, and then undiagnosed upper left calf pain, both times the pains went away on their own with no real treatment.
In August 2011, as you can see, it was my soleus.
Last year, I had some brief pain in my peroneus lungus tendon.
So yeah, quite the history of calf and leg pains. Why do I run again? Oh, that's right, I eat like a 14 year old boy, as my husband puts it.
The soleus pain has repeated intermittently ever since it started, but it's never been serious. In fact, I don't think I've ever been in a position where I thought it was better to stop running for even a couple days.
The good news is, the calf pains move around. It's not always my left leg or something (though the current posterior tibialis pain is in my left leg).
Sunday, as I mentioned, we had to do a lactate threshold test. What that meant in practice was warming up for a couple miles, then running a total of 30 minutes as hard as possible. The critical point was that the auto-mile timer on your watch had to be off, and you mark a lap split after the first 10 minutes.
It leaves you with two laps for the 30 minutes -- the first 10 minutes, and then the remaining 20 minutes. Our coach looks at your average heartrate for the last 20 minutes as being your lactate threshold. And the mile pace for the entire 30 minutes as being your approximate lactate threshold pace.
During the 30 minutes, you're basically running solo. Occasionally being passed or passing, and hearing and saying words of encouragement, but basically all to yourself.
And pretty much everything hurt at some point doing those 30 minutes. First it was my feet. I was worried I'd pulled something in one of my feet, then in the other foot, then it didn't hurt anymore and it was my shoulders. Then the pain was in my lower back, then in my quads, then in my calves, then I was worried about peeing myself, then there was pain in my neck, then in my quads again. It was pretty much a constant stream of misery for 30 minutes. And you just have to tell yourself to keep going because the only thing worse than all that hurting would be to have to repeat the exercise. Even easing up isn't an option because then your numbers will be disappointing low/slow.
Anyway, at no point during the 30 minutes do I remember any sharp pain in my posterior tibialis.
We finally finished the 30 minutes and basically all stood around gasping for breath and stretching a bit. Then we did a cool-down jog of 2 miles at an easy pace. And about one mile into that jog, I definitely felt it.
I mistakenly thought it was pain in my Achilles tendon. That's a relatively new one for me. But it hurt. I was able to finish the jog and didn't feel like I had to change my gait or anything, but I knew it was the start of something.
Better belief I was on a chiro's table that same morning (not an easy feat on a Sunday) (haha, feat/feet, oh, too funny). He did a lot of foot and ankle rolling and moving and pressing, and lots of poking and rubbing on my calf, and then all of a sudden, he found it.
For me, it's apparently a very mild case of inflammation at this point. The pain is on the bottom third of my calf, on the inside between my calf and my shin.
So he suggested I take it easy for a day or two and watch it, icing as needed.
There seems to be very little pain today, 24+ hours later. I went to boot camp this morning, but opted out of the running just to avoid aggravating it.
We shall see where this goes, but wanted to share my new muscle knowledge with everyone. Hopefully this is just the first pain of the year, and it will go away as quickly as it came on.
I have a running friend who went to nursing school and said she felt like she had a huge leg up (haha, leg up, oh, I'm killing myself with these jokes!) when it came to studying the leg muscles since she'd either injured (and learned) most of them herself, or had heard about injuries from friends.
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