Today on the Doc On the Run Podcast, we’re talking about what a runner should do if you’re worried the pain under the big toe joint might be a sesamoid stress fracture.

Sesamoid stress fractures may be one of the very worst injuries affecting runners. In fact, of all overtraining injuries that could actually seriously put your future of running at risk, it may be the sesamoid fracture that has the potential to ruin your ability to run forever.

Pain in the ball of the foot under the big toe joint can have a few causes.  The key of course is to make sure you know which condition is causing the trouble.

So first and foremost, you want to make sure that you don’t miss a sesamoid injury.

Summer has a dirty little Secret…

If you get injured and wander into the hospital in the summer months you are more likely to end up with a bad result. Believe it or not, statistically, you are even more likely to die.

Your chances of dying in a hospital are highest in July. A study published in 2010 in the Journal of General Internal Medicine exposed one of medicine’s dirty little secrets. All medical internships, surgery residencies, and fellowships begin on July 1st every year. Because of this, July is simply the riskiest month have foot surgery or any other surgical procedure associated with hospitalization.

This is not complicated. After eight years of sitting in college classrooms and medical school lecture halls, the wet-behind-the-ears medical intern is just itching to try out all of those skills he or she has read about. The problem is, they have a lot of learning left to do.

You don’t really want to be the first person when a new foot doctor tries to make a surgical incision on your foot. You also don’t want that new, nervous, over-worked and sleep deprived intern fumbling through a Pharmacy handbook while writing your medication orders at 4:00 a.m. You are far more likely to have a bad outcome in July for several reasons.

In this episode, I will discuss the 5 tips to avoid surgery complications common in July.

If you’re a runner, the chances are good at some point in your running career you have had an aching, throbbing sensation in the front of your shins. And chances are also good if you talk to your running buddies they would quickly explain to you that you have a case of shin splints.

Shin splints may be common, but they can also be confusing.

As I have said in many other episodes, you have to know what you are treating, before you can treat it correctly. If your doctor has misdiagnosed your condition, or if you have misdiagnosed yourself, you may be using the “right treatment” on the “wrong problem.” Of course if you do that, it’s unlikely you will improve.

In this episode we are going try to eliminate some confusion so you can know what to do if you get a case shin splints that doesn’t seem to go away.

Is over-resting slowing your recovery? It might be. Sitting still is a killer for athletes. Not only does it bum you out, but a long period of immobilization can actually increase your chances of having another injury later.

A few days ago I got a call from an athlete who had been unfortunate enough to have a serious injury that required surgery. So when he called me, he already had surgery and was well on the way to recovery.

After six weeks of rest he felt like the rest was killing him. And he had just been told by his doctor that he needed another month or so of rest before he could start regaining strength and becoming active again.

Understandably, he became frustrated.

Today on the Doc On The Run Podcast we’re talking about how over-resting can actually slow down your recovery from a running injury.

Let's face it, the primary tool used by runners are running shoes. Although we often think about heart rate monitors, GPS watches and all sort of fancy fabrics for our running clothes, nothing will affect your performance as much as the very best, properly chosen running shoes.

Given I am a sports medicine podiatrist with a practice catering solely to helping runners run, and I like to run, you can rest assured I always run in the very best running shoes.

And not surprisingly, other doctors, and lots of runners ask me which running shoes are the best. That's not an easy answer. Of course the short answer is that the best running shoes are the ones that work best for you. But you have lots of variables. Your foot type is probably different than mine. Chances are good that you're a faster runner than me. You also probably have a different training regimen and set of goals for this year. Your running shoes are supposed to help you run further, decrease your risk of injury and protect you while you train.

The very best running shoes are always an accurate reflection of the runner’s particular biomechanics, running form, training regimen and particular goals. So in this episode we're going to talk about some of the ways you might want to reconsider your running shoe choices.

Whether you’re training for your first 5K, a half-marathon, Ironman triathlon or 100 mile ultramarathon, you have to put in lots of miles. To keep logging miles, increasing your speed and building your strength…you have to avoid injury.

The real game with building strength and fitness in long distance running is to systematically stress your tissues so those muscles, bones, tendons and ligaments all have to rebuild themselves and become stronger.

So whether you are self-coached, you purchased an online training program, or you have hired a professional coach to help you, the task is to help you choose workouts that will deliver the maximum amount of tissue damage that your body is capable of rebuilding before your next key workout.

But if you do more tissue damage than your body is capable of rebuilding, and then you do another hard workout, you get an over-training injury. In this podcast we’re talking about overtraining myths, and other B.S. that you need to know to avoid an overtraining injury.

This week I was invited to lecture on Runners Heel: Pearls for Podiatric Physicians at the International Foot & Ankle Foundation Meeting at the Swedish Medical Center in Seattle, Washington.

The attendees to this conference included podiatrists, foot and ankle surgeons and sports medicine specialists. The lecture was on runner’s heel pain and I was discussing the differences between plantar fasciitis, infracalcaneal bursitis, neuritis and stress fractures of the heel bone.

The goal was to try to explain to doctors the ways that they could tell the difference between all these conditions in runners how they can help their patients continue running even if they have a partial rupture of the plantar fascia or plantar fasciitis.

 As a runner, you will find the main lessons of this talk helpful...

Today on the Doc On the Run Podcast we have a truly inspirational guest: the Iron Cowboy, James Lawrence who is famous for settling two world records: both the number of Half Iron Distance triathlons done in one year and then in 2012 he also set a new world record for the number of full Iron Distance triathlons done in one year. But then, he did 50 Ironman distance triathlons in 50 days, and in all 50 states!​​​​​​​

Today on the Doc On the Run Podcast we have a truly inspirational guest: the Iron Cowboy, James Lawrence who is famous for settling two world records: both the number of Half Iron Distance triathlons done in one year and then in 2012 he also set a new world record for the number of full Iron Distance triathlons done in one year. But then, he did 50 Ironman distance triathlons in 50 days, and in all 50 states!​​​​​​​