PODCAST - how i healed plantar fascitiis without stopping running
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[00:00:00] Welcome to the Athlete with Asthma Show. I'm your host Johnny Ha, an ultra runner endurance athlete, and yes, a guy who's had an inhaler prescribed since birth. Despite doctors telling me I could never play soccer nor run a marathon, let alone a hundred K ultra. I prove them all wrong. This show is where I share everything I've learned from breathing techniques to mindset shifts to help you become the athlete and the person you truly want to be.
So if you're ready to achieve your goals, despite limitations, let's get started.
Any type of pain is a norm. The most annoying may be heel pain, especially if you're a runner. Well, today on the show I'm gonna share with you how I have overcome and how I've healed from plantar [00:01:00] fasciitis. Also known as really painful heel pain without stopping running. 'cause one of the things that. Uh, people say when you have heel pain, foot pain, any type of pain, you need to stop doing the thing that is potentially causing the pain.
Well, for me, I love working out. I love running, I love doing yoga. I love doing all the things that in theory can have a negative impact on plantar fasciitis or heel pain recovery. Well, I've had plantar fasciitis multiple times in my life and just. Let's spell it out here. So if you're watching this as a video, plantar fasciitis, P-L-A-N-T-A-R-F-A-S-C-I-I-T-I-S, plantar fasciitis, also known as.
Heel pain, but not just heel pain. Really [00:02:00] annoying heel pain. I've had this multiple times in my life. I had it for the first time, well, before I would consider myself a runner. It was when I really started getting into yoga and I was doing yoga, specifically yoga sculpt, which is yoga plus HIIT training, so high intensity interval training.
Weights and cardio. I was doing this five to seven times a week, and sometimes I would do it twice in one day. Well, what I found, and really why I got plantar fasciitis in the first place was because I was doing these workouts barefoot, and since I was doing these workouts barefoot, I was creating unneeded tension, pulling from my calf and from the arch and the rest of my foot that.
Really created this excruciating pain in my heel, and that's what I have found over the years is let's say that. [00:03:00] So if you're watching this as a YouTube video, let's say that this is your lake and then it goes, and I'm not a good drawer. So it's probably a good thing that you're not watching this as a YouTube video and you're listening to this as a podcast.
But basically if this is our leg. And then we have our calf over here, and when our calves get really tight, they start pulling on our heel. So this is our heel. Our calves start pulling on our heel. The other thing that happens is our arches, or for me, I am very flatfooted, so. What happens is when we're using our feet, especially when we don't have the support of a shoe, we're pulling once again here.
So where does the pain occur? It occurs in our heel [00:04:00] 'cause our calf is pulling and. Our foot, our arches pulling. Other things you may see is our calf wraps around our leg, so it wraps towards the front here, and then we have our shins. Well, if our shins start getting tight. So let's say we start having some knots in our shins that could in turn, pull on our calves, which makes our calves tighter.
And if our calves are tighter, that can pull more on our heel. And there you go. Even more recently, what I've seen in my, my latest stent of plantar fasciitis is this continues up. See the rest of our leg where we get to our hamstring. So let's say that your calf doesn't have any noticeable knots or it, or it doesn't have the tightness you would associate with causing heel pain.
Let's say your Achilles, which is kind of right below the calf, where your [00:05:00] calf meets your heel, is where we have our Achilles. I'd say that all of that is pretty loose, but your hamstring has all this tightness. Well, if your hamstring's tight, guess what? It's pulling on your calves, which means that even if your calves don't have knots, they're still tighter and they're ultimately pulling down to the heel.
Well, in that case, you probably also wanna look at your. Quads and see what's going on in your quads, which are in the front of your leg. And if your quads are tight, then it could cause instability and it could cause issues with everything else being tight. So ultimately, when we look at treating plantar fasciitis and what I've looked at treating my plantar fasciitis over the years, what we really need to look at is everything around the heel.
That doesn't mean we don't want to use different interventions on the heel itself. It [00:06:00] just means that if we solely focus on the heel, we may alleviate some of the pain in the short term, but in the long term, we're still gonna have plantar fasciitis or that annoying heel pain. The pain where it keeps you up at night.
Or it starts throbbing when you put your feet on the ground for the first time for the day, maybe a mile into a run, or maybe when you start your run, a walk, a hike. You have radiating pain coming up through your heel. Well, first time I got this, I wasn't a runner, but it was affecting me being able to do yoga.
So I did different things, and based on what we just discussed, really what I learned is that if you have plantar fasciitis, the first place you need to look at is your calf. What's going on in your calf, and if your calf's really tight, then it's likely that you're. [00:07:00] Achilles is going to be tighter than it should be, and your heel's gonna be tighter than it should be.
Well, what I also consider when I consider plantar fasciitis is if you have plantar fasciitis, means that things are really tight all over the place, which means that you may be more prone for other injuries, which is why even if you can deal with the heel pain, even if you use different things like I'm gonna talk about today.
That make the heel itself feel better. If you don't work on the underlying challenge or the underlying stress that is creating the heel pain, you could have some other really painful, even worse injury occur. The most recent stint of plantar fasciitis. Started for me back in 2023 after, or while I was running my first 50 mile ultra race.
During training, it was fine, [00:08:00] but I remember during the race, near the end, I started having a little bit of heel pain and ultimately after that race I just had a little bit of heel pain. That wasn't debilitating. I was able to run and really, I didn't even worry about plantar fasciitis for the next couple of years.
Yes. This last stint of plantar fasciitis I had for more than two and a half years, including running my first a hundred K Ultra and winning it. Yes, I had plantar fasciitis. I had annoying heel pain throughout that entire race. Now it was much lower than it ended up being in the past. Six to nine months, which ultimately caused me to do something about it.
But I also had a lot of adrenaline, a lot of other things going on that were motivating me to not even care [00:09:00] about having plantar fasciitis and ultimately finishing and winning that race. Now, I was still going to a sports masseuse, which is really helpful in preventing injury for me because he was checking different things and making sure that.
My range of motion throughout my lower body. My upper body was where it needed to be. So that I wasn't in a position where an extreme injury would occur, but after dealing with very painful heel pain in my 12 hour endurance race in 2025, and ultimately deciding to drop out and only run 20 miles instead of 62 miles in this 12 hour race, I decided that I needed to do something about my heel.
So what did I do? Well, at first I did nothing other than. Reducing mileage. And I did this because at the time I was running 80 to a hundred miles per week [00:10:00] and I knew that if I kept beating up my heel and my fascia. Because that's what the fascia is Part of this is, is when you have all this tension in your calves, in your foot, in your achilles, in your hamstrings, in your quads, all these things create tension.
They pull on the fascia. Well, the fascia is this tiny layer. That covers all of your muscles, and when that bunches up, it can be extremely painful and it creates these little knots in the fascia, which is what the plantar fasciitis planter is. Your heel and fasciitis. Is the inflammation of the fascia in the heel.
What happens is when you have plantar fasciitis, you're putting all this pressure on the heel and you're continually beating it up. The inflammation stays there, the bunching of the fascia STAs there, and it's extremely hard for you [00:11:00] to alleviate this without taking some sort of intervention, some sort of recovery protocol like I'm sharing with you today.
And remember, I'm not a healthcare professional. Everything I teach on this show and share with you is from my personal experience. So I highly recommend that you consult with your healthcare professional to make sure that you get the right care for your needs and what you're experiencing with in your body.
So I was running 80 to a hundred miles. I dropped it to 20 to 30. Miles. This is a lot different than completely saying I'm not gonna run anymore. Now, I wasn't doing ultra marathon mileage anymore, but this is still, you run 20, 30 miles a weekend and let's be real. I was probably going closer to 35 miles in some weeks.
This is still marathon training [00:12:00] mileage. So no, I wasn't doing a hundred mile race mileage. 'cause that's what this is. You running 80 to a hundred miles per week. You're training for a hundred miler. This is still a 26.2 mile mileage, which is pretty impressive. So I did reduce my miles by about three to four x.
And this really helped to give myself some rest. Tell my body, Hey, we're in a rest period. Let's send some more love to different areas in our body. I also, if you've been following the channel for a while, know that I didn't just reduce the mileage to heal my heel. I reduced the mileage because I burned out.
I was only running, I wasn't doing other things. And I'm gonna share a little deeper as we get further into this episode is that was one of the reasons why my plan for fasciitis got so [00:13:00] bad is because all I was doing is running. I didn't cross train like I had for other races when I won my a hundred K Ultra.
I was cross training. I had a much more holistic training regimen, and that's the training regimen that I'm using today is even more holistic. So if you are dealing with plantar fasciitis and you're running a ton of miles and that's all you're doing, then yes, you should decrease your mileage. But that doesn't mean that you necessarily need to decrease how much time you're spending working out on a given week.
And depending on what your healthcare professional says, you don't necessarily have to go to zero miles. You can keep doing what you love and recover from plantar fasciitis. The first thing you do wanna look at is how can you reduce your mileage and maybe look at how you can start. Taking that time that you use to reduce mileage to incorporate a more holistic workout [00:14:00] routine.
And that is the second thing that I did is I added strength. And hit, which I had completely cut out, which was just a bad decision on my apartment. What happened is I saw how good I did running 60 to 80 miles a week and I was like, you know what? What if I up that to a hundred miles a week? And the only way I can do that is I'm not gonna have time for strength and hit, but that's okay.
I am only gonna do this for a couple of months. While that was a bad decision, 'cause now what I've done. Is I lift one to two times per week, and I also do hit. Yeah, one to two times a week, and I even started playing tennis, which I don't necessarily recommend that you do. I really enjoy [00:15:00] tennis and I love playing sports, and tennis is a little.
Less of a impact sport than playing something like soccer. I love soccer. It's a much more context sport than tennis. So I play tennis once a week. You know, obviously there's some things that can occur. If you're training for a race and you're doing one of these things, you could get injured lifting. You could get injured doing a high intensity admiral training workout, and you could get injured playing a sport.
Even tennis. But what I've seen by doing this on top of running 20 to 30 miles a week, my muscles are stronger. And when your muscles are stronger, the impact of running goes down. 'cause your muscles act as shock absorbers, which means that your body is taking less of a beating. This is why it's so important to have a holistic training routine.
For any sport, if you're an ultra runner, [00:16:00] just running mile after mile after mile. Isn't the best way to protect your body. The best way is to run X amount of miles and integrate these other things. When I lift, I focus on some lower body exercises. I also do core and I do some upper body. Because what me and one of my really good friends have noticed is we could not even be holding much in our upper body pack.
But after you're going for 10, 15, 20 miles, you're gonna start feeling your shoulder. You're gonna start feeling some pain in your upper body. So yes, you should also focus on your upper body. Then high intensity interval training builds your body's resilience. To the rest of this. It builds up your cardio and it also builds up your muscles to deal with really intense stresses over short periods of [00:17:00] time versus when we're running long distance, we're putting stress on our body over a long period of time.
And while it can be intense, it's not as intense as the stress we put on our body during hip. Same thing. Tennis has little. Quick bursts of energy and it starts working kind of your side to side movement, your quick decision making, your quick changing of direction. So by integrating this into my routine and by cutting down my mileage and making the time to integrate this into my routine, I started seeing my heel improve.
But this on its own, especially after having plantar fasciitis for over two years, wasn't gonna heal my heel. And that's where my nightly routine comes into the mix. So the third thing [00:18:00] is I put together a very simple nightly recovery. Routine made up of three different pieces now throughout the years and the first time that I had plantar fasciitis, really what helped me improve and recover was reducing the yoga sculpt classes I was doing from doing sometimes yoga, sculpt a couple times a day down to just once a day and then.
Focusing more on hot yoga to fill in the gaps where I was doing yoga sculpt, but I was also strengthening specific muscles like glutes and quads to help with the impact hamstrings. Calves, they're like strengthening these things, and [00:19:00] I use something that I call this a compression band. This is not what this is actually called, but I call this a compression band because what I do is I take this band and I wrap it first.
I wrap it around my foot and I wrap it around my foot. Very tight.
And you gotta be really careful and this way you need to talk to a healthcare professional. 'cause using something like this could create complications for you depending on what your health. Situation is now for me, this works really well and this is basically how I wrap it. You wrap it around your foot, you gotta avoid the joints.
Basically, you are not wrapping this around your heel, but you're wrapping it around. And why we do this is because this specific piece of equipment helps release the fascia. The fascia that's [00:20:00] bunching up because everything else is tight. So that's why we wrap the foot. We wrap, the calf can wrap your quad.
And I know I'm using my arm as an example here. You wrap your quad mainly 'cause I'm not gonna stand up on this table and show all of you who are watching on YouTube. But you wrap these different pieces, but you wrap and then what you wanna do is do some movement. So you can do some heel raises, can walk around the house, do this for one to two minutes, and then we take it off and fresh blood, fresh oxygenator, blood shoots into the areas that we just wrapped, which helps break up the fascia.
Now we want to do this in the parts, not just on our foot, but on our calf, on our quad, on our hamstring, because we wanna. Open up the fascia of everything, and [00:21:00] that helps us heal from plantar fasciitis. One of the great things about this is this is one of the only things that I've found that gives you immediate relief.
So if you have really painful plantar fasciitis and your doctor says you can pick up something like this, I have it linked in the show notes and a YouTube description below, then you can get the long-term benefits. Of doing this, I was really desperate to get rid of my plantar fasciitis. So I started doing this every night, or I at least had the intention of doing this every night.
I probably only ended up doing it about three to five nights a week, but since I had the intention of doing it every night, I was able to do it three to five times a week and probably closer to the five night a week side of things. But the great thing and why this is so powerful is because it's gonna help you long term, get over plantar fasciitis.
Short term, it's gonna get rid of the pain or at least decrease the pain. And this is something you [00:22:00] can use not just on your feet and your legs, but you can also use it on your arms for other aches and pains that you have. Now, like I said, this specifically, you need to talk to your healthcare professional about to see if this is safe for you to use in your situation for this.
Has been gold for me over the years, and when I integrated this into my nightly routine of, this is actually called a WOD band, a wad band. This really combined with these next two pieces helped me get over. My two and a half years of plantar fasciitis. The next thing, and this is also more of a short-term and long-term tool, is we have our foot roller.
Now this, I also have it length in the show notes on [00:23:00] the YouTube description. This has all these little knobs, so what you wanna do is roll this on your heel, and then when you find a spot. That hurts a lot. You want to kind of go back and forth and work out that knot. 'cause there's a knot in the fascia that you are working to release, so you can do it here.
You can also use the side of the roller. Works really well. So I like to do this and I like to do it throughout my whole foot, but really just focusing on the spots in the heel specifically, and this is out of everything we've talked about here. This is the only thing that I use directly on the heel.
Everything else, we really are serving everything around the heel, but this piece we're using. Specifically on those really painful spots on the heel, we want to rub them out with this. And yet again, [00:24:00] I like to do this nightly. And you stack these things, you habit stack them. So I'll typically either start with this, the roller or the wad band, but when you.
You don't even have to do this for very long. A couple minutes with each item in all this should at max take you 10 minutes, but more likely it's gonna take you five minutes, five minutes a night to help you overcome your heel pain. Now, the last thing here, I don't think this would've worked without because, well, I was foot rolling for a while.
And I wasn't. Even though the day-to-day pain, I was able to alleviate long-term the change wasn't happening. And then I was using my wad band here and there, but I wasn't doing it enough to get a consistent effect and release. [00:25:00] The piece that put things over the top was my foot and calf stretcher. Now this is meant to help you and I.
Overcome plantar fasciitis. This thing's amazing. My friend Brandon gave this to me 'cause he knew that I was dealing with plantar fasciitis. He shared some other tips as well where he actually will take a heating pad and wrap it around his calf. While doing this so we can stretch even deeper. That didn't work that great for me.
Or maybe I just couldn't get the heating pad to stay how I wanted it to, but this is amazing. Basically what you do is you drop your heel in here and then it drops your, your heel brings your foot up, and you're stretching your foot, your Achilles, and your calf all at once. I do this. To this day because of how good it feels, it's [00:26:00] really good for stretching the entire back line of your leg, and it's really good for stretching out your heel.
Now, the sad thing that I've kind of learned throughout all this is since I do love ultra running. I now that my plantar fasciitis has subsided, will need to continue doing these things going forward to prevent it. Now, it's sad because I wish that this was just a quick fix of, Hey, you do this for five minutes a night for one to two months, or until your plantar fasciitis goes away and you're good to go.
But the reality is having a routine like this. Can. Also prevent plantar fasciitis and other injuries, which is why even though I wish I could just be like, okay, I'm back to normal. I don't need to continue doing this. I'm glad that I have these tools to [00:27:00] prevent plantar fasciitis in the future and other injuries, other worse injuries, other tears.
And different things that can occur when our fascia is really tight, when our calves and hamstrings are really tight, and when our plantar fasciitis knots in our heel, get outta hand. But you should definitely look at picking up a foot stretcher. As well. I share all of this because combining all of this together should be able to get you there.
And for me, this is what healed my heel in this last stint of plantar fasciitis. Uh. One of the other keys to the longevity of my ultrarunning career, and I plan on ultra running for the next 20 to 30 years, if not all the way till. I'm a hundred years old. I have this goal of running at least a marathon, but I'd love to run a 50 mile race at a hundred years old.
Well, one of the [00:28:00] keys to just. Longevity in general as an athlete is having a team behind you that could be a variety of healthcare practitioners. For me, I have a variety, but my favorite is sports massage, specifically focusing on range of motion. And getting rid of knots throughout my body. Could be knots in my legs, could be knots in my shoulders.
I tend to get headaches, pressure headaches from tight shoulders, so. What I've done is I've worked with my sports masseuse over the years with different goals. So if you go to a sports masseuse and you tell them, Hey, I have plantar fasciitis. It's in this heel. I am doing these stretches. What they can do is they can help you speed up the recovery.
You still are gonna need to do things on your own. You're not just gonna go to a masseuse or a chiropractor or a doctor and have [00:29:00] them. Dry needle or acupuncture or adjust your foot or massage your calf and all these things and be good to go. You are going to need to take this upon yourself as well, but they can speed up the process.
Now, my goal for you in all this is to be able to take control of healing your heel. I know that there's some situations where people. May feel like they need to get surgery for different foot pains and different things. Well, my goal for you is that you don't have to do that, and I don't think you have to with plantar fasciitis, I've had very different degrees of plantar fasciitis over the years.
Some very debilitating where I can't even get out of bed. Others where I can run a hundred K Ultra and be like, Hey, it hurts, but it doesn't hurt enough to stop me and what I know. Is by putting a little bit of effort every single day and having the [00:30:00] right tools at your disposal to help you every single day, you can heal your heel yourself because I wanna make sure that you have all the tools you need to be a high level athlete and to live.
A happy and healthy life. I want to give you a gift and it's my three pillars of Healthy Living Guide. It is linked in the show notes and in the description. If you're watching this on YouTube, in this guide, I'll take you through my three pillars of healthy living's. Really simple movement. It's what we got on the board.
Tracking and accountability, well tracking. We're. Kind of doing that on the board too, tracking how many miles we're running, what is our holistic workout routine looks like tracking how often we're lifting, doing hip, maybe playing a sport, and then tracking how often we're doing our nightly routine.
Tracking could also be keeping track of your caloric intake and your output. [00:31:00] How much are you burning? It could be tracking your water intake. So many things. When we track things, it's important to us and we can make changes in our lives. And then accountability is where just by. Tuning into this YouTube video or podcast episode, I am able to help you be accountable.
You can also work with an accountability partner. You can work with a family member, a friend, or if you ever. Find yourself wanting to work directly with me. I have options of how we can work together. Link in the show notes and the YouTube video as well. Either way, you can grab your three pillars of Healthy Living Guide linked Below in the show notes, or go to www.athletewithasthma.com/healthy-living-guide to grab your free copy.
I'll see you in the next episode.
Thanks for tuning in to the Athlete [00:32:00] with Asthma Show. I hope today's episode inspired you to overcome any perceived limitations you may have. Remember, your health and wellness journey isn't about perfection. It is about progress. So I invite you to take a small step right now towards your goals, and if you found something helpful here, make sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share the podcast with others on a similar path.
Until next time, keep challenging yourself and redefining what's possible.
