Injury Pains

This post was written by Andrea...
2012 seems to be my year of injuries. As if right on cue to the new year, I developed forefoot pain that bothered me from January until the beginning of March. I was able to train successfully from then until April, but then I re-aggravated a distal hamstring strain during an interval workout. I decided to train through it until the Half Marathon Championships in June. After that, I slowly ramped my training back up. I finally got my mileage back up... only to begin experiencing hip pain in July. I decided to take more time off..

...and here we are now - its September and I've hardly run in the past month. The hip pain got worse over the next six weeks. In that time, I tried ART, physical therapy, and a round of oral corticosteroids with no relief from the hip pain. Just last week, I got MRIs of both my hip and my spine. Results = inconclusive. A little displacement in a nerve in the spine area, a little unusual labral characteristics, but nothing that couldn't show up as a false positive on someone that was 100% healthy and asymptomatic as well.

One of the most frustrating things about an injury is not knowing: 1) the root cause of the pain, and 2) how to recover from/fix it. I was given the go-ahead to exercise again as long as it didn't cause the pain to get worse.

So this week I started running/cross training a little more. The hip pain actually seems to be getting better with exercise... but at a cost. The biceps femoris muscle of the hamstrings, from the distal attachment to the short head, is painful when I run. So the million dollar questions - are the two injuries related? Is one causing the other? Are the problems I am experiencing coming from a completely different source? Could all this be related to the chronic back pain I had up until May of this year?

It is so hard for me to be injured. I like to be as active as possible, whether it be running, hiking, skiing, cycling, etc. I'm trying to stay positive with all of this, but I NEED my exercise to keep me sane, to relieve stress, to clear my mind, and to feel like I've accomplished something every day.

I'm at the point now where I just want to be healthy again. Forget about training for a specific race, forget about high mileage and tempo runs. I would be perfectly content to get up every morning and go for an easy 30 minute run and be able to have fun adventures. For a while, at least :-)