The unglamorous truth about a runner’s toe nails
Have you ever seen a runner wearing shoes exposing their toe nails i.e. on a wedding or any other social event? Nope? Not surprising at all ;) Before I discovered my love for trail running, I loved painting my toe nails and wearing peep-toe shoes. These days are over. For good.
Warning: This article contains pictures of blisters and lost toe nails. These are part of a runner’s life but may be upsetting or disgusting to others. So if you scroll down and look at the image gallery, don’t say I didn’t warn you ;)
When you run on trails, especially hilly and rocky ones, your toe nails get bruised. That’s just what happens when you run over rocks, hills with a gradient of (+/-) ~ 40% . So it’s paramount to wear the right trail running shoes. When I say “right”, I mean the right shoes for you! Every foot is different. So one might need a wider toe box than others, for instance. I have come a long and painful way until I found the right fitting shoes for me. As in real life: It’s painful until you finally find the right one. Same story when it comes to finding the right trail running shoe ;)
I’m not going to lie. It was a long, hurting and expensive road until I found my ones. But there’s no other way than trial & error which also means that you’ll get many blisters and bruised toe nails during that journey. Tip: To make it less expensive, keep the original shoe box, keep the shoes clean and in case they don’t suit you, you can sell them for good money on eBay.
Believe it or not, but I also found it interesting. I’ve never had a bruised toe nail before or even lost one! I was super afraid of that and had some horror scenarios in my head. But here’s what I experienced…I call it “The different stages of a runner’s toe nail”:
I felt a tension on my toe nail. A very weird feeling - like someone is pulling on your toe nail from all sides.
Then, my toe nail got black, dark red, blue, green, yellow and ended up having mixed colours.
The tension got worse and it started to feel like someone’s trying to pull the toe nail off. That wasn’t a pleasant feeling.
So, my toe nail started to split off at the top of the toe - now I got scared but the strange thing was that the tension started to ease and it was less painful
What happens during this is that the new toe nail is growing underneath so the old one needs to make space, thus it starts to lift off.
Ok, so here comes the fun part: My old toe nail started to lift off more and more and at some point. It was just hanging there fixed on only one end of my nail. It was such a strange feeling and it looked absolutely crazy but it didn’t hurt! Getting in and out of a sock became quite a skill because the last thing you want to do is to pull off the old toe nail. You need to wait until it falls off by itself so the new, healthy nail can fully grow. Also, otherwise you risk (another) infection if the new nail hasn’t fully developed yet.
So I waited and waited and waited and someday in the evening, it suddenly felt like I have a stone in my sock. It took me a few seconds to realize that this must be my old toe nail! So I took off my sock and tadaaaa: There is was: The old toe nail. I screamed but more like a “OMG! YAY! I just lost my first toe nail!” - a tiny proud moment of a trail runner’s life ;)
That was it. The new toe nail is a bit squishy in the beginning but after 2 or 3 weeks it was just as strong as the old one. It doesn’t look as neat as the original nail but hey ho, if that’s the price to pay for experiencing incredibly gorgeous trails and adventures, than I’m more than happy to pay for that by not painting my toe nails any longer or wear peep-toe shoes (btw: they are super uncomfortable anyway!)
Depending on if I had an infection on top of it all, it took up to 5 months from injury to healing. I’ll spare you the details of an infected toe because as you can image: It freaking hurt, I had to take penicillin, I could barely walk for 2 weeks, wearing socks was impossible, etc. In a nutshell: No fun.
And then the cycle begins all over again…on another toe or perhaps the same again…until you find your perfect running shoe. But don’t be fooled: I’ll still get some bruised toes from time to time but not as bad or infected or often as before.
Also, I know what you’re going to say now: “Ouch, that sounds really painful. You didn’t run with these nails, did you?” The short and honest answer is: Yes, it did hurt but it didn’t keep me from running - except in one case when I had to take penicillin because the infection was really, really bad and I couldn’t even wear socks. One of my favourite mantras is: Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. Of course it hurts but that’s an unavoidable reality. The question is whether or not you can face that pain, have an open mind and focus on something positive instead. For instance, I was reminding myself that I am very lucky and blessed to have two healthy legs so I can run at all. I won’t let a bruised toe nail or blister ruin my trail run and my experience during that run.
Alrighty, if you scroll down below this line, you’ll find some images of my infected, bruised and lost toe nails. If you don’t like to see them, no worries, just don’t scroll down and jump to another blog post; for example this one where I talk about what I do these days to avoid blisters. For those of you who are intrigued, don’t say afterwards I didn’t warn you.
