Apparently my shins don't like this. Advice?

[highlyeccentric]

Sooo, I'm getting shin pain - upper 50% of the shin, and the pain is mostly at the front and... surface? It doesn't feel like deep calf muscle pain, at any rate. It's noticeable when running, and a bit the next day.

A bit of poking around with google suggests this might be shin splints - I already wear orthodics for gait correction (one suggested solution to shin splints), but they're rigid 3/4 sole ones so I suspect they're contributing to the shock transferrence from the road surface.

I'm wearing sneakers, but fairly cheap ones.

Neither my budget nor my health insurance will cover seeing a podiatrist or physio at the moment. I'd rather not replace the (new) sneakers right away, but I grant that buying cheap-ish ones might have been a mistake.

Anyone know at what point shin pain means 'stop this at once' as opposed to 'duh it hurts, you're incredibly unfit'?

Weekend long run

[rmc28]

The aches I'd noticed on Thursday were still there faintly on Friday, and gone on Saturday.  I gave myself an extra day for caution and today  I decided to go for approx 10k, which turned into 12.2k because of fitting my running time to the thing I was listening to (ahem).  I did 30s:45s run:walk, and averaged 8:46 min/km, more or less the same as last week.

I was trying to consciously pay attention to how I was running, how the ex-broken-toe and the opposite knee were feeling, and also (given discussion on highlyeccentric 's post) how my shins were feeling.   Toe and knee seemed fine, with occasional twinges (the knee was feeling unhappy at about 8k but eased up again before I got home).  Shins were occasionally achy but this also passed.  By the time of writing this, an hour or so later, my muscles are aching but not my bones or joints.

A couple of my rather-more-experienced running friends have talked about "trying to run as quietly as possible" as an approach to running in the most efficient/least stressing way.  The idea being that trying to break down the movement into most efficient steps is hard to think about, but "being quiet" is a whole-body exercise using all our conscious and unconscious feedback, and seems to approximate to the same thing.  There is no way that I actually run quietly, but I can certainly change how my feet hit the ground so as to run more quietly and it does seem to feel more comfortable too.

If I still feel ok tomorrow I will try my back-to-running week 3 again, with 30s:30s run:walk.