So I hit the thousand mile marker for this year. This is something, at the beginning of the year, I wouldn't have thought possible. I spent most of the first three months of this year with a diagnosis of athletic pubalgia. In simple terms, I had a soft tissue injury in my groin area. More specifically I had small micro-tears in the tissue that connect my abdominal muscles to the front of my pelvic bone. I couldn't run twelve feet without sharp pain occurring in my lower abdomen.
Sometimes the pain would go away after a hundred yards or so and I'd continue my run. When I had runs like these I would have the shooting, sharp pains tenfold about twenty to thirty minutes after the run was finished.
I got this injury sometime late last September. I went on a long run in Brown County State Park and around the twenty mile mark my adductor muscles (especially the one in my right leg) got extremely tight. As I was running up the Hesitation Point trail, I stubbed my toe on a rock which pitched me forward. When this happened my back bent backward and I overstretched my abdominal muscles. This movement combined with a real tight adductor muscle caused an unknown amount of minitears along the pelvic bone where a lot of connective tissue happily live. I yelped at the sharp pain and called it a day.
Then I got rearended in an automobile accident about a week later. A few days after the accident, I ran the Knobstone half marathon and I injured my right foot. This was basically an overuse injury. So I couldn't run for the next couple of weeks. All the while the more serious injury was present but kind of in the background. I couldn't run because of my lame foot so the injury was never irritated. After three weeks, I started to slowly get back into running.
By this time, the Tecumseh Trail marathon was coming up and I went on a long run at the Paynetown SRA to see if the marathon was even doable. After about ten miles my adductor seized up and I had pains going from the back of my knees to my belly button. Not good. Luckily I was able to defer that race entry til the next year. The injury was still present or reoccurring after a month. Also, not good.
So I went to Dr. Michael LaGrange (a local family medicine/ sports medicine doctor). He diagnosed me with athletic pubalgia. I was prescribed anti-inflamatories and physical therapy. I went into physical therapy with the knowledge that if it didn't work surgery might have to be an option. Physical therapy started in January and, something I didn't know at the time, would last for three months. Every Wednesday I would go and have my abdomen stretched and then I slowly progressed to balance exercises and then to strength building exercises. Every other week I would come home with a sheet or two of things to do that would strengthen my core muscles. Some of the exercises would trigger pain, others not. Some of the simpler planks would trigger pain while more difficult plank exercises wouldn't. The therapists were perplexed.
I would diligently do the exercises. Every morning I would wake up and do some before work. My boss gave me permission to do sets at work if time allowed. I would do more exercises after work. Then on Wednesdays I would get new things or modifications of old ones. I started to progress and heal quickly. The therapists even commented that I was a fast healer. They did caution me that rest was just as important to the injury as the exercises I was doing. My motivation was to avoid surgery at all costs.
So this was my routine at the beginning of the year. In the spring I started to do slight jogs. If I had a small twinge of the pain, I would stop. Some days I would run a mile, other days I would run ten feet. Eventually I worked my way up to a mile every other day. Then I made it to two and then three pain free miles.
It was around this time that I started heart rate training. I would run but keep my heart rate under 145 beats per minute. If I was running too fast my heart rate monitor would beep and I would have to slow down or even walk. but mostly walk. My aerobic threshold was super low. Which was good because this new way of training kept me from overexerting my healing body. I slowly rebuilt my endurance in a new way and was soon running for an hour to an hour and a half. The heart rate training kept me at a snail's pace but I was seeing improvements. My pace was increasing but my heart rate was staying the same.
A few weeks into running and at the beginning of heart rate training my therapists discharged me. They put me through a battery of tests and were satisfied with my progress. It was strange. I spent every Wednesday for the first three months of the year going to see them at ten a.m. And then I was done. I graduated. What was I to do? Go for a run !!!
This injury was a game changer for me. I realized that I liked trail running enough that I didn't even flinch when it came to the work needed to get myself back to running. I never thought twice about not doing the work. I couldn't run and I wanted to run. (I also wanted to avoid surgery) I wanted to be on the trails in nature. I never thought of what I did as work. In a way the exercises were medicine. Now I see them as preventive medicine and I'm a better runner for continuing to do them.
I've been thinking about those first few months at the beginning of the year a lot this past day. I've run a thousand miles since then. In those miles I've run two half-marathons, a full marathon, and a 50k ultramarathon. Training weeks included twenty or more mile long runs in 1000% humidity. During some of these runs, which would have been miserable for me a year ago, I would find myself smiling. I was and am happy to be doing what I'm doing.
Would I go back and do it over again? If I could avoid that injury all together, would I? The injury, the physical therapy, the frustration, and fear. I think I would. That experience has made me a stronger person both mentally and physically. I've changed my eating habits to make myself a healthier person and not just a fit person. I am grateful for that injury though I would never have thought I would think that about it then.
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