Wow, I Need to be in Therapy

Physical therapy that is. I finally bit the bullet and paid a visit to my physical therapist this week. I haven’t seen him since about 2 years ago when I was having some muscle imbalance issues. My Achilles was still bugging me on Monday so I broke down and made the call. After looking me over he determined my problem is actually being caused by a weakened right hip muscle (again with the muscle imbalances). So my right hip is out of whack, ultimately affecting my stride, and actually shortening my leg length which is causing more impact on my Achilles (all the googling in the world wouldn’t have brought me to that conclusion). He thinks this is something that can be corrected with hip exercises and stretching in about two weeks. And the best part: I don’t need to stop running.

I was fearing the worst – when you get to the point where you actually need to go to a doctor about a running pain all of the worst case scenarios in your head scream “no marathon for you”. When I told my doc my race was at the end of November he shrugged it off with a “no problem”. So I am cautiously, cautiously, cautiously optimistic. I am stretching and icing and doing hip exercises and continuing to marathon train like an idiot. I have taken a few days off over the last 2 weeks so it’s time to crank it back up a notch. I’ll take the old Achilles out for a test long run this weekend and see how it’s responding so far.

Good luck to everybody tapering for early October races, a bunch of big ones go down next weekend – watch those hip muscles!