Toe Injury?

[mdl]

Not sure this is the right forum area for this, but other injury threads seem to be mostly here...

I've been having slowly increasing pain in my right big toe (rear foot).  I've googled around and there's info about turf toe from golf, but as far as I can gather turf toe is an injury to the main joint in the big toe, what you call the ball of the foot.  I have pain and some swelling in the little joint of the big toe.  It's not severe pain, and I don't actually feel it much when golfing, so it's not a huge deal, but it's starting to swell and gone from barely noticeable nuisance to more annoying and noticeable.

I've really upped the amount of time I'm spending practicing (which I can afford thanks to my newish birdieballs and my local park!), with full swing practice going from ~100 balls at the range once or twice a week 4 months ago to more like ~200 birdieballs 2-4 times per week over the last 1-2 months (plus the same 1 round per week I've been able to afford the past 4 years).  I suspect golf as the cause because of this and because if I take a swing with no shoes on it hurts more than any other motion.

I'm 30 and otherwise active and in good shape.  Anyone else ever suffered something similar?

[Stretch]

Have something very similar to this too. Aches like a mother. Not so much at the time, but definitely at night after hitting several buckets in the afternoon. Mine stems, as best I can tell, from a combo of frostbite damage (got lost in the backcountry at Jackson Hole) and incipient gout (I, uh, rather enjoy red wine.) While your cause probably varies, I've definitely found that the shoes you wear can have a huge effect on how much, or little, you aggravate this while practicing. You (or at least I) want something with a squarish, rigid toebox that lets the big toe "float" inside when you reach the finish up on the point of the right foot. Whatever you do, don't hit balls in running flats, or any other unstructured shoe, unless you enjoy pain!