I guess you could say this was the week that wasn’t. After spending about 10 days running on a sore hip flexor (which started the day after I did lunges for the first time in a long time – won’t do that again), the combination of a race, long run, and a lot of time spent in a vehicle driving last Sat/Sun was more than my body could handle. By Sunday afternoon, I was in considerable pain just walking around and wasn’t much better come Monday. Having been knocked out too many times to even count by this same thing, this was a very familiar injury for me, and honestly I was afraid I was looking at 2-3 weeks of downtime, maybe more, based on past cases.
Not wanting to give up what little fitness I’d managed to gain and also hoping to figure out why I haven’t been able to break this cycle in spite of hitting the weight room and working on my core, I decided to try a new doc and called up Oasis Chiropractic. I contacted them mainly because I knew they do something called Active Release Technique (ART), a form of massage that is designed to break up scar tissue. I couldn’t get an appointment until Thursday, however, so about all I could do in the meantime was rest and do the standard treatment of massage/foam-rolling, ice, heat, and ultrasound. By the time I got in to see the doc on Thursday, I was a little better, but still a long way from pain free.
The doc confirmed what I basically knew was the case. My right gluteus medius just isn’t doing its job, and as a result, it’s recruiting other muscles to do what it should be doing, thereby overworking those other muscles (my hip flexor in this case). He went on to say that he didn’t think my gluteus medius was necessarily weak (which it shouldn’t be since I’ve been trying to strengthen it), but he thought it just needed to be retrained to fire like it was supposed to. He also said I have a good bit of scar tissue built up in my hip (no surprise there), and that could be inhibiting the ability of the gluteus medius to work. Overall he felt like my balance, strength, stride, and alignment were all pretty good, and that with some specific work to retrain the gluteus medius and some ART to break up the scar tissue, I should be good to go fairly quickly. He even told me he didn’t see any problem at all with me running the CDR the first weekend in September.
Anyway, I got the ART done, which hurt pretty bad just like I heard it did, and he gave me some basic exercises to start retraining the gluteus medius. I go back on 7/30 for more ART, and if I’ve mastered the exercises he gave me, he said he would move me on to plyometrics to really get things where they need to be. I’m hopeful this will be what finally gets things over the top. I’m pretty sure I’ve finally found the root cause of most of my problems, which was the first step in getting healthy, and now I just need to be able to fix it. I’m hoping I’m finally on the right track towards getting that done as well.
My hip is feeling pretty good now, so whether it’s the ART (the afternoon after getting it done I felt significantly better), rest, or the other treatment I’ve been doing, I seem to be getting back faster than usual. My plan is to ease back into running this week and see how it goes. I’m hoping it will go well and I can get back on it fairly fast. If so, I’m sure I’ve lost a little fitness since I didn’t have much to begin with, but maybe I won’t have lost so much that I’ll have to alter my plans for the fall. This definitely wasn’t what I wanted, but if the ART and new exercises work, it might be the final step in figuring everything out, and if that’s the case, I’ll gladly have sacrificed a week in order to gain months of healthy training.
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