REPORT FROM THE PHYSICAL THERAPIST

Wow! Look at the size of his... hands. There is no problem
there, I assure you. No problem.

So, I went to the physical therapist last Friday. She was very nice and appreciated all the Beaver gear I had on since she graduated from Oregon State herself. Basically it was an hour long appointment to diagnose what was going on and then teach me some exercises that will hopefully rectify the problem.

First, I verbally discussed what was going on. What makes my case so hard is that the symptoms change a lot. It's not a simple case of "I have pain in X when I move Y" or something like that. Sometimes my knees get swollen. Sometimes it feels like my calves where beaten with a hammer. Sometimes my hamstrings seize up. Generally though it tends to manifest itself in the "kneeular" area and keeps getting worse, to the point now that one physical activity will leave me limping.

So after thoroughly confusing her with my symptoms, she preformed some tests on me, basically testing my flexibility and strength in a variety of ways. Generally I suck in all areas. One test really stood out though. She was doing various strength tests, having me push/pull against her to resist her trying to push/pull that part. When it came to my hips, I literally had nothing. It was embarrassing. After "trying" to stop her from pushing or pulling or whatever she was doing, she was like "Okay, let's do that again, but really try this time." In my brain I was trying to find the muscle to really try but literally nothing was there. Anyways that was an eye opener.

Once she was done with all of that stuff, she basically diagnosed me with weak hip and glute muscles. In addition to strengthening those, I'm also going to strengthen my core. She did watch me run and it was good to hear I was in the right shoes (support) due to my running style. So she was pleased with that. Basically, when I am running my hips are just kind of flailing about from side to side with each step instead of being strong and keeping my body more rigid. Think of it as a sea-saw going back and forth with each step instead of staying more level with each step (good article here). This sea-saw action is jerking my knees around with each step and likely causing my issues.

It makes sense. My "injury" is not really an injury, like a torn muscle or whatever. As suspected, it really comes down to a muscle imbalance. So hopefully what she diagnosed is correct. If I can bulk up my hips, ass, and core, I'll be able to run "in balance" again. I'm actually excited at the prospect. So much of the last year has been running around trying to avoid flaring this condition up and it's been frustrating. I'd like to get to the point where I can just really go outside and attack it again. I miss the feeling of a nice, hard six mile run without the prospect of limping around for the next week.

My life now.

Towards the end of the therapy session the therapist gave me some workouts to do at home to help fix some of my problems. So I've been doing those. Some squats, some side to side squatting while sliding with a resistance bad, and planking. Holy shit, planking. I am only doing 45 seconds at a time but shaking like an boozehound in the morning. I'm also stretching because, as we all know, I'm not very flexible. Once I build up some strength, we'll slowly introduce running again. Maybe a half mile three times in a week. If that goes off well, then increase it to one mile. And so on and so forth.

Eventually, I should hopefully be back to running without issue. It's going to be a multiple month process though. I'm thinking marathoning might be out this fall. That's okay. I definitely want to get back there, but I want to get back there healthy. So I need to get back up and running and then hopefully do some cross training and strength workouts to prevent this from happening again! I'm not sure when I'll attempt another small run, but probably not for a couple weeks I'm guessing.