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Calf strengthening - a common benchmark is to be able to do 30 single leg raises, both bent knee and straight knee. If you can’t manage that then perhaps make it your priority before running again
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If it's the medial gastrocnemius, I've had similar.
Everything is fine, but then it feels like it's been stabbed, and anything over a slooooow jog pace is all but impossible.
The pain was due to it being overworked - having lost a lot of muscle mass from my legs (having dropped from 200 miles a week on the bike to between 30 and none), I was no longer benefiting from sheer leg strength to protect me from a lack of control. My knees would bandy about with each foot strike, and the calf would have to do way more work than it's happy with.
Rehabilitation was a combination of strength work and neuromuscular conditioning
- Single leg squats (very assisted with a chair / wall / band), making sure that my knee was not moving sideway, lots of balancing type work. Among others:
- single leg hopping / bouncing between quadrants of a cross (forwards, backwards, sideways, diagonally), again focusing on keeping everything tracking straight.
- reverse lunge, pausing at the bottom, pulsing calf raises on the front leg (sometimes banded), keeping weight on knuckles of first and second metarsal-phalangeal joints.
Caveat - your problem may be totally different, and doing these things could make your leg drop off.
- Single leg squats (very assisted with a chair / wall / band), making sure that my knee was not moving sideway, lots of balancing type work. Among others:
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cookiemonster
NotThamesWater
@meneer
Injury advice. Started running recently, doing the Nike Run Club half-marathon plan, running 3/week (intervals, recovery, long.) Ran a first 15k last Friday, maybe a bit fast but feeling good. Then last Monday after 10min comfortable running my left calf starts to hurt, gradually but fast. Tried running slower but had to stop and was hurting when walking back home. Didn’t run for 5 days, did gentle stretches and standing calf raises. Almost a week later, I still feel my calf when regular walking. Should I rest more or go back to running? Anything else to help with this?