Oh, snap.

And not in a good way.

It looks like I've got a stress fracture. I went for my normal morning run Sunday. As is my custom, except when the ground is frozen, I ran barefoot. Since we had cold rain all night, my feet were pretty cold, but otherwise there was no discomfort.

When I got done I wiped the mud off my feet and noticed the telltale bruise of a stress fracture above the third metatarsal. If it is a stress fracture (it's pretty hard to know for sure for a few weeks), this will be the third time I've had one. It's been a different metatarsal each time.

The first time, I thought it was just a bruise and kept running until it became an overt fracture. There wasn't much mistaking it when that happened. I was in a race when it snapped and had to hobble the remaining mile or so to the finish. The second time, I recognized the pattern and let it heal before things got really bad.

Hopefully, that will be the case again this go round but, at the very least, it's a few weeks off at a time I was hoping to start ramping up my mileage. Bummer. The amount of stress in my life right now will not be easy to handle without running as a coping mechanism.