Back At It

I took these last two weeks completely off. No running, no exercise bike; I was letting my body just heal up without needing to recovery from workouts. To the untrained eye, it may have appeared I was being lazy. Maybe to the well trained eye too, but anybody who claims I was being lazy, I'm just going to accuse of not having a well trained eye! Ha!

Today I finally at least jumped on the exercise bike. It was good. Real good. As boring as it is to work my tail off to stay in one place, it felt wonderful to have everything in motion again: heart beating, legs pumping, my body being turned into one big gatorade filter. Gotta love it! Surprisingly enough, I haven't lost that much fitness over these past few weeks of being a bum. I ended up going 11.02 miles in 30 minutes, not too shabby! Don't crunch the numbers Marcy, you'll only find out that I 'smoked your ass'!

Also, yesterday I mentioned thinking of switching physical therapists, and the decision has already been made. But not by me. By my PT's wife. Or, well, technically it was made by their baby who decided to be born yesterday! Since he has so much going on, I'm getting shifted around to a lot of different PT's within his group. I'm not complaining, though, because after seeing other therapists I think I will better be able to tell who I like best.

The verdict after today, though, is that I like this new guy better. Nothing against Rob, but I think the new PT has a lot more experience with runners. He mentioned several times today similar experiences with other runners, and although he acknowledged I don't sound like an easy case, he made it sound as though it was very manageable.

He explained it pretty well, too. Essentially the bursa sacs (inside the joint where the pelvis and femur meet) and the IT band can aggravate each other in endurance athletes. But it turns into a "which came first, the chicken or the egg?" problem, since the IT band can become inflamed and irritate the bursa sacs, or vice versa. So the solution? Treat both, and also strengthen the entire area.

It makes sense to me, and I feel like we really have a handle on it. He also suggested a general game plan, and, um, it sounded almost identical to what I posted yesterday. Maybe I do know what I'm talking about, despite being injured for the last 2 months? His suggestion was to start being active again with biking and swimming, then next week run 1/3 of my goal mileage for the end of therapy, which is 10 miles. From there we continue to add mileage until I'm up to my goal of 30 miles/week by the end of therapy.

Tomorrow: more time on the bike, maybe 40-60 minutes. Thursday: The swimming begins. Its good to be back to being active!