Injury Update

This past week, I saw a sports med doc and a chiropractor about my pain. Both are quite sure it's the same thing: my sacroiliac joint (si joint) is out of whack.

It hasn't really felt any better in the past week after the half iron relay 8 days ago. I started to pay attention more to the pain, and I realized a lot of it was coming from my lower back. It sometime would hurt inside my knee just a bit above the kneecap (what felt really bad during the race), but it would also hurt sometime higher up in my groin, and sometimes outside of my leg in the "dimple" of my butt. (But I can NEVER pin-point the pain.) Walking around "normally" is usually fine, but ask me to step up or down a curb and I'll wince in pain. I'm still limping up steps, and down is usually tricky too.

It may have started because of my foot pain (on the OTHER side - on my left side) from about 10 days before. Maybe limping around on that side threw something off on the other side. And it maybe stemmed from all the foundation work I did on my house over the last 2 months - I was sitting weird to caulk, patch, and paint around my house.

Just after the race, I felt like the right side of my lower back (or my hip itself) needed to POP, but I didn't feel like it hurt. I'm pretty sure (and so is the Doc and the Chiro) that my sacrum is a little out of whack and that's yanking on something up my right leg causing that pain down towards my knee.

Here's what my SI joint SHOULD look like:

And here's what mine looks like:

OK, that's an exaggeration, because this is probably paralyzing, but you get the idea...

If I try to take a quick "running step" across the road (like if I see a car coming and need to hurry up a bit), I get a lot of pain up my leg and in my lower back. I literally can't run 1 single step yet. If I have to, I end up nearly buckling at the knees. I'm bummed that it doesn't seem to be getting ANY better, but I'm taking it easy. I'm seeing the Chiro again this week to see if he can knock in that joint, and I've been doing exercises from the sports med doc for the last 5 days.

So I won't be running the TC 10 Mile in 3 weeks. Dang. But I'm really not too upset about that. I've gotten better at "being injured" over the years - I'm fine taking time off knowing that it will help fix the problem. I just hope that time WILL fix this problem.

Oh, and here's a selfie of Henry and I at the sports medicine doctor's office:

That's my boy.

It felt a LITTLE better on Sat night / Sun morning after stretching really well on Saturday for the first time since the race. And I was able to go on a pretty pain-free 16 mile bike ride yesterday. But walking isn't perfect, and running is still a "no go." Time to ice it a little more... hoping for the best!