jane fondas

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so it seems that i'm not going to be a marathoner in two weeks anymore. i hurt my dumb hip. i haven't run in almost three weeks now, and my hip still feels kinda off. it feels pretty good most of the time (except i limp a lot and i'm not even aware of it anymore) but i've attempted a couple of 30 second runs and learned that running still causes a significant amount of pain. so...goodbye bellingham marathon. maybe hello bellingham half marathon, if i can heal soon. maybe hello tri cities marathon october 28th? i'm not sure yet. it really sucks because i have spent over three months on a strict training plan. i've run two 20 mile runs, one 21.5 mile run, a couple of 16s, an 18, two 19s, and a whooooooole bunch of things in the 5 to 14 range. many of them at 5 in the morning. many of them on saturdays when i wanted to be sleeping. and now that might have all been something i was doing toward no goal whatsoever.

what happened was a combination of lots of running and a weak muscle - my gluteus medius, which i don't know a whole lot about except that i am strengthening mine now through leg lifts, which my physical therapist calls "jane fondas", and something he calls "monster walks", which means walking sideways with a resistance band around my ankles. the gluteus medius sits along the pelvis (i think?) and helps to stabilize the hips/pelvis in running and other things. since my muscles were weak, i was unstable and one hip was rotated farther forward than the other one, which in turn made my IT band get really tight, which meant that it could smoothly glide over my hip bone region and started to cause some pain, which is when i finally noticed that things weren't quite right. i've learned a few things from this...

1. don't run when your legs don't feel quite right. if i had taken a day or two off when i first felt that something was a little "off" in my left leg i might have saved myself a whole lot of weeks off in the end.

2. i thought (subconsciously) i was really invulnerable to injury. i've never really been injured in my life so despite the fact that lots of people sustain running injuries it didn't occur to me i might be one of them. now i know to pay a little more attention to how i'm feeling.

3. it might have been a bit much to go from training for bloomsday (i was really, really, really concerned about running it in under an hour, which i did, thank our lucky stars), straight from that into training for the coeur d'alene half marathon, and straight from that into a 16 week training program for the marathon. i tried to follow reasonable training plan for all of that. but i'm newer to being super serious about running and all of that back to back was probably too much.

4. strength training is really important. i do strength train. but i did less when i started running more. and i certainly was not doing jane fondas or even considering my poor neglected gluteus medius one bit. my gluteus medius didn't like being neglected and it let me know. so i think i'm going to ask my PT (which is a physical therapist but i keep accidentally referring to him as my personal trainer) for exercises to complete as long as i keep running so that i don't ignore essential parts of me again.

5. my doctor was virtually no help with this, but my "personal trainer" was so helpful. i've had to go in twice a week for a few weeks and he explained everything about how this happened, how to strengthen the muscles to keep it from happening again, showed me muscles and joints on a skeleton, and was generally just really helpful and not at all rushed as if 10 other patients were sitting in hospital gowns in their respective rooms waiting for his attention. my doctor's advice was to take a few days off running and he explained virtually nothing about hip injuries. so lesson learned - i'm going to the physical therapist as soon as possible if something like this happens again. no offense, doctors...but i like to understand what's happening and what to do to fix it, and my doctor didn't seem to care that i understood or not. also, he seemed to think that doing a marathon was kind of silly. whatev, doctor. whatev.

soooooooooo now i'm not sure what to do. i've been spending an undesirable amount of time on the elliptical machine and the recumbant bike and missing the fine september weather we're having. but i am catching up on the classy magazines at the gym, which mostly consist of US Weekly and Star. awesome.

brad and joel are brewing their own beer right now in the kitchen and arguing about what a "rolling boil" is so i think i might go get involved. since i'm not out doing the 16 mile run i was supposed to do this weekend. meee :(