Discussion: Fall races

...if there are any, otherwise we may have to run time trials against ourselves to satisfy our craving for competition. It's a paradox, running seems to create physical and sometimes mental problems and obstacles but also seems to heal them.

Quite a litany of out of the blue issues. I have no clue what heel cracks even are other than, from context, painful.

They are weird things. I've had them occasionally before. At best they're only annoying, but they get really painful when they run all the way down into the part of the heel you walk on. At least once, and maybe twice, I've successfully glued the sides together with superglue to keep them from lengthening like windshield cracks. Gotta be careful you don't end up with your fingers permanently attached to your heel. But the vaseline patch-and-tape system Florence came up with seems to be working well, and clearly less radical than superglue.

I've had quite good success using neosporin covered by a bandaid, after a good wash/dry first. Then once the pain is gone use a callus file to shave down the callus so you're less prone to cracks developing.

Huh. Never heard of a callus file. This one looks a lot like a cheese grater. Florence's treatment also involves neosporin.

You could also try a pumice stone which is less drastic than a callus scraper. Many of them now appear to be "cakes" with no handles.

Wow that one looks serious! Mine looks more like the wimpy pattern on the other side of the old box shaped cheese grater. The side that you never actually use for cheese. It was what there was in the first pharmacy I went looking in for one after reading about it in a book on foot care by a doctor who takes care of ultrarunner's feet.