Pain on outside of ankle

Lital

Barefooters
Feb 12, 2015
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0
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Hello friends!
I've already posted on Ask a Doc, but I wanted to hear from other fellow barefooters as well. Perhaps some of you have experience.

I'd like to ask about some ankle pain I have. I developed it after I ran a Marathon last year. It comes and goes, and I haven't figured out how to keep it away.

Its pain on the outside of my left ankle, sometimes behind my ankle, sometimes in front. It get worse with activity. It hurts to bear weight on it, and hurts to pronate my foot inward.

I have flat feet and my feet pronate inwards when standing. I also have big toes bent inwards. I run landing midfoot. I didn't have any ankle problems the 5 months prior to the Marathon, during my training. It started when I hit the 30K in my training schedule.

After the Marathon I wanted to keep up half marathon runs every weekend, I loved those. It felt like the sweet spot. But now with this pain I do 5k once a month at best. Its very sad :(

I'm doing ankle strengthening exercises in the form of balance exercises. What else can I do? Any idea whats wrong? And what is a likely cause?
 
I had some ankle pain a few years ago, which I associate with what I think was a stress fracture in my left fibula.

The pain started the spring/summer after the fracture healed. It was mostly there while running and went underneath the ankle joint (the end of the fibula) from the front left to the rear left. It started out mild but increased to kind of annoying over a few months.

I tried all the usual strengthening exercises, and keeping loose and relaxed. Finally, in desperation in the middle of a five mile run, I tried stiffening that ankle when landing. The pain was gone in about 10 steps. I continued like that for another mile and a half or so before I thought I might be overdoing it, because we're supposed to run relaxed, right?

For the next few months, whenever the pain came back, which was fairly often at first, I did the stiff ankle thing for 50 or 100 steps. Gradually it tapered off and I haven't had a problem with it since. I'm guessing the fracture left the joint a little loose and running stiff ankled helped to tighten/toughen things up somehow.

If you think there's the possibility that you have a stress fracture somewhere, my "fix" may make things worse.
 
I don't think I have a stress fracture, when the pain was at its worst last year, I got X-rays. They showed nothing.

I'm glad you found a solution to your pain :)