The Story

Distance running can be thankless, isolating, and physically debilitating. Why do it, then? I put in the work for those days when everything clicks into place, when my body seemingly forgets it's limits and the run becomes effortless. I'm also working towards overcoming a year-long injury and training for the Olympic Trials Marathon in February. This blog follows that story and beyond, however it may happen.

Tuesday, May 5, 2015

PT #3 today

Back to PT today. Started off with some similar hands on kind of work with the therapist digging into my hip to loosen things up. Other fun things included "distracting" my joint by using a band to pull my hip laterally while I'm laying down. That part actually felt amazing. She also did some work on my psoas, though she took it pretty easy on me. She was pretty tame compared to when I've had that done in the past. Next time I think I'll ask her about that and get her to push a little harder. 

We also did some basic active stretching. Walking lunges to stretch my hip flexor, leg swings, that kind of thing. Man, it's really tough describing on paper what kinds of things I work on at these appointments. I'm finding myself strugging to find the right words to bring it to life. Maybe I'm just feeling lazy at the moment. I just want to say "yeah she pulled this leg that way and I swung my legs to stretch that muscle, and so yeah everything loosened up by the end and I think I ended up feeling pretty good...." In addition to being way overladen with unnecessary sexual innuendos, a sentence like that, though easy to write, doesn't really say anything about what happened. Doesn't make for very informative reading. Oh well, I hope the descriptions I've given offer enough of an idea about the goal of the appointment, which is still to break up the tightness and scar tissue I've built up. This time we just did a little bit more than this past Friday. This coming Friday I'll add more strengthening exercises; next week I'm going to try running on the Alter-G treadmill. I'm skeptical about that though, I don't think running on the Alter-G will be worth it for me because of the nature of this injury. I've never felt like the pain is impact related, which is what the Alter-G is designed to reduce. I'll have to just see how it goes I guess.

I spent the rest of the day with Ali buying flowers to put in our garden and doing a little cleaning up outside. I'm actually pretty excited about our garden this year. Ali has done most of the work but I still feel some gratification from seeing new buds popping up. Last year we attempted to build a garden on the slanted roof of our last apartment and it was a rip roaring disaster. The sun cooked the hell out of everything and we really didn't have the right pots for everything anyway. We have some carrots and peas poking up now which is already better than last year. Nice!

(Don't worry, this won't turn into a gardening blog)

AH

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