Achilles Rupture Recovery

A stay-at-home day – as agreed with my manager and GP, my GP writes me off sick one day a week at the moment, which helps me compensate for the extra time to get to work, do physio, etc.. In this case, she wrote me off sick Fr-Mo. Although I’m still working on these days, I don’t travel in – travel to work as an off-sick-registered employee in Germany can get you into hot water if anything happens.

It really does help, though – got my local physio days on Monday and Thursday (a remote working day anyway, like Tuesday); no meetings in the afternoon, so all stress-free. Still not a big fan of massive companies (like my employer), buuuut one has to recognise that there are advantages compared to smaller employers or, even more critical with this kind of injury, self-employed.

At physio in the afternoon I got the pleasant news from ‘The Boulderer’ PT that my gait was looking pretty normal … in his words, “If I didn’t know you were injured, I wouldn’t notice!”. Noice 👏 💪 🙏 .

There are downsides to normality returning. Like no longer having a good excuse not to hang up the lamps my partner needed putting up in the ‘new’ appartment 😅. Actually, she’s been really patient … it’s been 2 months now, and she hasn’t complained at all. But today … well, no more getting out of it! Some swearing and sweating, then it was done without mishap.

Other than that: a shite day work-wise – a colleague of mine, who shall remain nameless, ‘went off on one’ – a massive over-reaction to someone just trying to help. Would have been fine if it had been directed at me, I’d have shrugged it off – I know what ‘The Dictator’ can be like – but it was directed at my daughter (who works on my team); unfortunately, I wasn’t present … rather I was with my Tuesday bouldering group. So he fucked up her day (no, her week), my day too, plus he directly trashed my week’s highlight.

All of this led to me abandoning my exercises today. I’m normally quite stress-resistant, but this was just too much at the moment 😬 😔 🤮.

It’s that rucksack again, all 15kg / 35lbs of it. I thought I’d be up to doing the walk to work and back without crutches … so took just one with me as an ‘injured person’ signal for all the hustle-&-bustle on the train. Didn’t use it on the way to my partner’s first thing, or from the station to work, took my time … but nevertheless the tendon was starting to hurt a little after some time standing around at work, which I’ve rarely had. And then I left it a little late to start walking back to the train station at lunch, so ended up stressing a bit … was wishing I’d had both with me at that point.

It’s that rucksack again, all 15kg / 35lbs of it. I thought I’d be up to doing the walk to work and back without crutches … so took just one with me as an ‘injured person’ signal for all the hustle-&-bustle on the train. Didn’t use it on the way to my partner’s first thing, or from the station to work, took my time … but nevertheless the tendon was starting to hurt a little after some time standing around at work, which I’ve rarely had. And then I left it a little late to start walking back to the train station at lunch … I was wishing I’d had both with me at that point.

Yep, screw that fast cool down. I mean, we all know: the quicker the better if you’re playing League or pretty much any kind of video game. Not so, when you’re rehabbing a ruptured Achilles.

I need 300-400m in the morning to even vaguely warm up (start out with 40-50cm slooow steps); by the time I get to my partner’s (900m or so), I’m finally loosened up. Then I sit down, have a coffee, and today, it was then time to walk back with our little doggo … and holy shit, it’s like back-to-friggin-basics. Still, at least it’s improving, if slowly – gotta stay positive about that.

A day of ‘Global Concern’ meetings followed … to some degree I can do my exercises whilst taking part (no video link 😅); some redditing; some Achilles hub project; it’s been a pretty good day, really, particularly compared to the last two 👏 💪.

Yeah, so don’t blame me if you don’t find ’em funny, ‘cos you weren’t there 😁! Buuut … you’ll see me crack up if you watch the clips to the end … and if you have a healthy ‘funny bone’, maybe that’ll trigger a chuckle or two 🤩 !!

My partner drove to see her eldest daughter yesterday, to bring back our granddaughter for the school holidays this coming week. So it was clear I was going to be walking to the station today. No problem: I’ll take the crutches, it’ll be fine. But I’ll have to leave plenty of time, I think.

Then I got moving … and had a couple of good tunes in my ears … and half way there I think: I could probably catch the half-an-hour-earlier train! Game on …

The last steep hill, though … I’m almost doing push-ups half the time to avoid loading the foot in dorsiflexion. Hence the max. pulse of 144 😅. And 11m ascension … feels like about 150m.

Made it with 30 seconds to spare 👏 💪 ! What’s more, despite more mileage than usual, having the crutches with me spared me all but the slightest of swelling. And that’s despite me making a detour on the way home to the physio practice to do a cardio session followed by a good 20 mins on the treadmill – totted up nearly 12k steps and not a shadow of what I saw just two days ago.

Crutches: worth their weight in gold not just at the early stages!

The day started early, shortly after 5am … again, for whatever reason. So yeah, I dove into Reddit for ‘a while’.

Now, I’m not generally one for getting involved in politics, to be honest … in general, my opinion is that the vast majority of polititicians are not in it for the right reasons. But – and if you don’t like it, you can lump it – Donald Trump … holy shit. He and his cronies have to be the worst bunch of corrupt assholes ever.

It is beyond me how any nation could put up with this kind of person at the head of their government. Not surprisingly, I am not alone in thinking this … but, like I said, I’m not going to go over the top or in deep here. However, I will paste in this one clever graphic I stumbled across ….

One thing occurred to me after that, as I did my shoelaces up: that’s another thing I completely take for granted. Much as I’ve been grateful for being physically fit enough to see to all things I need to during this injury, I started imagining what it’d be like to not have the finger-skills to be able to tie my shoe laces. Sure, you can by slip-ons (ugh). But that’d be the end of my chucks … no, not wearing slip-on chucks. And what about my climbing shoes? They’re velcro, I suppose … but I have to pull hard to get them on at all. There are just so many ‘little’ things in life you don’t think about …

Yesterday was spent almost completely in bed. Yes, trips out to the market, later to the shops, but nothing big. Today was ‘exercise day’ … but before that: an early wake-up-for-no-reason; and then on to Reddit. Today I was pleasantly surprised to find that someone else had been working waaaay longer than me on a project to fill that horrible gap in ATR sufferers’ lives:

Looks and feels really professional; exchanged a few mails mit Sylvy, who created it (in the course of a good 3 years, her rupture being back in 2022). Always heartening to find there are others who are not just out to try and make a ‘fast buck’, but are actively looking to help others where they can.

Weight: 68.0kg / 150lbs

Calf size: 34.5cm (morning)

Calf size: 35.5cm (evening)

Knees-toes: 15cm (morning)

Knees-toes: 8cm (lunch)

Knees-toes: 17cm (evening)

Elongation: all good

Single leg load:

Double leg deficit:

< As I noted last week: these values really do vary significantly – I can see that measuring calf size, as weighing myself, really only makes sense in the morning with ‘zero’ swelling. However, the knees-over-toes measurement is another kettle of fish: since the tendon is super stiff in the morning, that time doesn’t make much sense; but plenty of exercise towards the end of the day also seems to reduce the range as the lower leg gets tired – will think about this in the next days/weeks … >

Ankle Mobility (stage 2): No changes from the basic unit in the app here; as with the other units, however, Chris encourages adaptations once the standard exercises become routine. So I ran a couple of ‘level-ups’ I’ve been considering by him and he gave me the ok.
Consistency: Ropey. But still, this mobility drill is probably the simplest to do, some of it also anywhere I’m on the go (like the gait exercises can be done literally anywhere). This means, even if I didn’t have a clean enough conscience to tick ’em off every day this week, there wasn’t a day without some exercises.

Ankle Strengthening (stage 1 -> 2): As of Sunday, Chris has ‘upped the ante’ on this unit, introducing a bunch of new
Consistency: .

Lower Body Strengthening (stage 1 -> 2): As of Saturday, this unit has also been modified.
Consistency: Dreadful. After such a good last week (3 times), didn’t do this unit at all during the week, just this weekend.

Walking: Unfortunately, no pleasant walk with the dog this week … even started snowing again at the weekend. For that, not only did the local PT think my gait was almost normal, Chris Smith also had some positive words to say:

Honestly looks like you’re moving well overall! Nice stride length, nice pace. No glaring difference side to side there. I mean push-off looking solid – rolling onto your forefoot nicely and not lifting flat-footed.

This feedback was in response to the two shorts I sent on Thursday (see ‘Mental Health’), plus this excerpt of the Friday treadmill session:

It’s also vaguely comforting to see my walking metrics slowly tending towards normality again – the 8k average step count will gradually creep up over the year, I expect, as I become capable of hikes, then running, etc.. – assuming no re-rupture, of course 😬 🙏 🤞.

The walking ssymmetry as I type this (Monday of next week) is best of all when I’m using crutches (today currently just 0.2% for 2.5k steps!!), which is perhaps surprising … once you look at why, maybe not so: using two I am most capable of going a) fast, and b) even paced – using the crutches on beat 2 (injured foot beat 1; non-affected foot beat 3) means I can dynamically adjust the dose of support as I warm up … this avoids limping early on when the tendon is cold and pushes the point of fatigue much further out simply by reducing the peak stress on the tendon at push-off; it doesn’t, however, compromise my gait as it did when using it on beat 1 back when the whole leg had to be supported.

Additionally, both asymmetry and steadiness values depend quite a bit upon how and when I actually have the iPhone with me: if it’s with me permanently from the first ‘zombie shuffle’ step, this obviously negatively effects it; if I do plenty of steps outside with either a) no rucksack, or b) rucksack + crutches, this positively effects it.

Cycling: Still doing just stationary bike, 30min x 120W, no boot; only two sessions this week, Mon/Fri.

(Note: see here for benefits of low load cycling for Achilles rehab)

Climbing: still sticking to two sessions a week, on Tuesday and Sunday; still also wearing the boot; actually didn’t do any auto-belay climbs this week … the trashed session on Tuesday just didn’t make sense and today, Sunday, my bus home was not running normally due to road closures – got a lift home with my climber friend T who drives past my door, so no time.