There has been some discussion of this topic on the Ultralist over the past year or so as I recall and this article was recently posted on Ultra Adventures.
Title: Antibiotics and Tendons
Author: mday
Date: Monday, July 16 2007 @ 07:05 PDT
Injuries tend to beget more injuries. I’ve had kidney stones for quite a while. Last March I went on a trailing run with Mark Long and Rich Sexton, and we ran out of water for 15 miles or so, and got severely dehydrated. This is not too unusual in itself, but within two days I came down with a pretty serious urinary tract infection. Most probably it was caused by the combination of kidney stones and dehydration. For the UTI I took Cipro, which cleared it up, mostly. The UTI proved to be persistent – it was one reason I DNF’d the Boogie in June. I went back on Cipro, and started feeling really good. After a great training week where I logged almost 80 quality miles I woke up one morning with an extremely sore left achilles tendon. I could not associate any single event with the soreness so I determined that it was something I could work through. That proved to be wrong, and I exacerbated the injury by continuing to train. I’m convinced that the antibiotic contributed greatly !
to my injury. I’ve been logging that level of milage (not every week) for several years and I’ve never had any significant tendon injuries. My training preceding the injury was not significantly strenuous or in any way unusual. I’m not sure how typical my experience is, and it could also be possible that this injury was not due to antibiotics. However, next time I take a quinolone antibiotic I’m going to back off the training. I now have stage 4 tendonosis in my left achilles and am not running. I’m not sure how long it will be before I’m back on the trails – maybe a couple of weeks, possibly a lot longer.
Read the full article at www.ncultra.org
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