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At the moment I’m having to learn how to walk all over again. Don’t worry, I haven’t suffered a catastrophic spinal injury or stroke. But I am a victim of late-stance pronation, which is manifesting as a pain in my right foot.

Given I’ve just turned 58 it’s a bit depressing to realise I’ve been walking for 57 years without mastering it. But I’m embracing my growth mindset, and figuring it’s never too late to learn a new skill.

I first became aware something might not quite be right about two months ago when I developed a sore foot. It was nothing dramatic, and it’s not stopped me running. In fact, I’ve run some of my biggest weeks in terms of load with this injury, including Phil’s Big Adventure. (More about this later.)

While it hasn’t stopped me running, it’s certainly been bothering me. If anything, it’s been getting very slightly worse week on week. Still, I wasn’t too worried until about a fortnight ago when it struck me that I might have plantar fasciitis.

This sent a shiver down my spine because I’ve heard horror stories about how debilitating this can be - and the disastrous impact it can have on your running.

Without delay I consulted Dr Claude, my AI quack of choice, and he set my mind at ease - at least up to a point. Given my symptoms, the doc told me I was likely suffering from one of three things - plantar fasciitis was one, along with a metatarsal stress fracture. But Dr Claude was confident it was more likely peroneal tendonitis.

While this reduced my anxiety levels, I have always been dubious of Dr AI and his fellow practitioner, Dr Google. So I decided to visit Matt McKean of Keen Podiatry in Brisbane to get an expert opinion.

The first thing Matt did was interrogate me about my lifestyle. How active was I, how often was I running, how far, in what shoes and so on. “Are you doing any strength work?” he asked me. “I have a gym membership,” I replied. Enough said on that.

Next was a gait analysis which involved Matt watching while I sashayed up and down the gym equivalent of a catwalk. I cannot overstate how difficult it is to wander to one end of a room and back after someone’s told you to “just walk normally”. Yeah, right.

Once he’d gotten what he needed out of that, we moved on to walking like a gorilla. This involved standing with my feet shoulder width apart and toes pointing out slightly - 10-15 degrees.

I then softened my knees, so I was in a slight squat, and started to march to the other end of the room. The object here was for my foot to land flat on the ground. Bending the knees makes this easier. To get the full gorilla effect, you hunch over a little and swing your arms from the shoulder.

The aim was for me to feel - to really feel - what it’s like for the entire sole of my foot to hit the ground at the same time. This was way easier than walking “normally”, but I won’t be doing it in public any time soon.

We then switched back to walking “normally”. After walking like a gorilla, I was much more aware of the dynamics of my foot strike. It was clear I spend a lot of time in each stride with my weight borne by my heel.

Having mastered gorilla walking, we moved on to checking my hip alignment. At least that got a tick. I then shed my shoes and socks and Matt sat me down to have a poke and a prod at my feet.

While he was poking around, he let me know what he was looking for. Squeezing the bones down the outside of my foot got no response from me, which ruled out a metatarsal stress fracture.

He then moved onto the sole of my foot. When I failed to shriek in pain as he pressed the soft flesh in the middle of my foot just in front of my heel, he ruled out plantar fasciitis. That meant Dr Claude was right - it seems I have a case of peroneal tendonitis.

Tripod theory

Matt then explained the biomechanics to me. Essentially, your foot acts as a tripod with your heel, big toe joint and little toe joint as the three points of contact with the ground. The heel takes about 50 per cent of the load and the big toe 30-40 per cent. The little toe is essentially making up the numbers.

Ideally, when standing, the tripod’s doing its job and the knees and hips are “stacked” directly on top. To make this possible, the knees need to bend just slightly. This allows the pelvis to tilt, lining everything up.

Walking properly requires a similar dynamic. With each footfall, our knees should bend by about 10-15 degrees. This allows us to roll from heel strike to big toe joint (pronation) then to little toe joint (supination) and “toe off” in an ordered way.

Needless to say, this is not what I’m doing. When my foot hits the ground, my knee is locked. This means I’m on my heel for much longer than is ideal, and the pronation to big toe and supination to little toe happens in an all-fired hurry.

So how is this causing me pain? One of the key muscle groups in making this happen is the peroneals. Everyone has two peroneal muscles - longus and brevis. Some lucky folks have a third one - peroneal tertius. I guess evolution has decided that for some of us two peroneals is company, three’s a crowd. Or it could be the other way around…

The peroneal muscles run down the outside of the calf. Of the two (or three), it’s the longus that does the heavy lifting. It attaches to the bone via a tendon that runs from the muscle ending, down and around the outside of the ankle before tucking under the foot. The attachment point is on the first metatarsal - essentially in the arch of the foot.

The issue for me, Matt suspects, is that because my heel strike is so pronounced, the peroneal longus is poised to engage, but can’t fire because my knee is locked. By the time the knee bends, everything happens all at once, and that’s putting stress on the tendon.

Which is why, for the first time in 57 years, I’m learning to walk and, as Matt put it, “making friends with my big toe joint”. By focusing on bending my knees slightly, and grounding that big toe joint earlier in my stride, I should be able to teach my peroneal longus to fire earlier and that should take the pressure off the tendon.

More than a feeling

To help with this, Matt has put some padding in the arch of my shoes, glued to the insoles. This acts as a “proprioceptive target”. In other words, having that padding in place means that with every footfall, I can feel that part of my foot in contact with the ground.

It’s only been a couple of days, but already this is making me much more mindful of my footstrike. I’m focusing on both softening my knees, and ensuring my big toe joint has more time in contact with the ground.

The focus on walking rather than running is because knee bend happens automatically when running, which makes sense - I can’t imagine running with locked knees. In fact, the knee bend while running is up to 25 degrees, compared with 10-15 degrees for textbook walking.

There is one other factor at play here, and it goes back to what I wrote earlier about load. When Matt looked at the Strava graph of my mileage, he made the point that I started to ramp up about two months ago - roughly the same time my foot started hurting.

He said things are not always so straightforward, and that working on my gait is certainly worth pursuing, but it’s worth considering whether it’s simply taking my body some time to adjust to the increased load I’m putting it under.

With that in mind, I’m going to take a couple of deload weeks, before starting to ramp up - gradually - again towards the end of the month. Hopefully that will fix the problem.

If there’s one lesson this experience has taught me (again), it’s the importance of getting a niggle checked our early - by a professional rather than and online quack - so you can prevent it from turning chronic.

Upcoming Events

There are way too many events for me to list everything that’s happening around the country, but here is a selection of upcoming races (with a bias towards South East Queensland).

The Running Calendar website is a great source if you want a comprehensive understanding of what’s available around the country.