I love exercise. My leg – not so much.

Spin class - this time, it didn't hurt.
Next time, who knows?

Yup. That’s the totally ickily bummer thing about having such a bad old leg. It hurts - sometimes during exercise. Almost always after. Which, well, sucks.

I use exercise like a stress-relieving drug. I know now, after years and years, that exercise is the one thing certain to put me into a better frame of mind, no matter the circumstance. When my dad was sick and dying of cancer in palliative care, I am quite certain that exercise kept me from spiraling into despair. When I went through major life change after that, exercise kept me sane. Even now, when things are calm and settled – life still has its crappy moments, and exercise is still the thing I like to use to feel better. 

So when it just so happens that most forms of exercise that involve LEGS (sigh) tend to aggravate my right hip/thigh/knee – sometimes to the point of limping pain after, it can be a crazy upsetting, not to mention a real crap shoot trying to figure out what to do to get a workout fix.

This is all perfectly frustrating, too, as I’ve now gotten into a pattern, wherein I will get back into the gym (for example) for a good four weeks of strength training and lung/heart conditioning, with just twinges of pain. And then whoosh, all of a sudden, my leg will freak out, and then I limp around for a week, which seems to negate the four weeks previous, whereupon, at the end of the limping week, my leg seems okay, and then I tentatively get back into some sort of pattern, only to have it disrupted again. Profoundly annoying.

Anyway. I called Collingwood Sports Medicine to find out next steps, now that they have received the results of my x-ray, and I have an appointment booked for the end of February, prior to the as-yet-unscheduled MRI.

And next week, I will be doing something called a Functional Movement Screen with Steve Neal at his Crossfit Gym here in Orangeville. Steve did an awesome bike fit for me years ago, which resulted in instant and remarkable climbing improvement (it also improved just about every other darn thing I did on my bike). He’s also a great mountain bike coach, so I am really looking forward to hearing his impressions of how this leg of mine is working/not working.

What the dog did. 120 lbs of canine enthusiasm.

To give you an idea of how big Jake is, compared
to me: Yup. We're just about the same size.

Meet Jake, the world’s best dog. Well. He's the best dog in the world most of the time, anyway.

So, we’ve talked about how I hurt my leg originally. Then came the two subsequent injuries, about a year and then six months after that – both thanks to Jake.

Jake has a thing for squirrels. And we, every day, put three paw stamps on the daily walk sheet of his life. These walks generally take place in the park that is directly behind our house. About 100 metres from the back gate of our yard, there is a nice stand of rather mature maple trees. Squirrels love these trees. And, every day, the moment Jake’s nose goes beyond the back gate, he is in super-dog-squirrel-hunter mode. I know this, so he doesn’t get to have room on his flexi-lead until I too have scanned the landscape for squirrels. But there was this one day (there’s always that one day) when I wasn’t paying attention so much, and Jake shot out of the gate in pursuit of a squirrel, right to the end of the 16 feet his leash would allow, which was, naturally, about 200 feet short of where the squirrel was (sigh). He yanked me off my feet, quite thoroughly, and of course I went over on my RIGHT ankle. More sighing.

So that hurt a bunch, and ended up being a minor sprain. Which added to the whole right leg problem, now extending down into my ankle.

The next incident was much the same, except Jake spied not a squirrel, but rather a most unusual dog – a German Shepherd Corgi cross (honestly, the oddest looking dog I have ever seen) – I am pretty sure Jake didn’t actually perceive it as a dog, which led to his great excitement to get closer and check it out. The problem this time was much the same as the squirrel incident, except I managed to start running with Jake, but just couldn’t quite get the big guy under control, and tripped. On the same right ankle. Sprain. Again.

The whole point of the ‘what the dog did’ story is that my right leg has really suffered its fair share of injury over these three years. I’m sure these two incidents have helped create this everlasting inability to keep it stable. The good news is, my ankle doesn’t hurt anymore – but that took a really long time.

And Jake is getting a lot more mellow about squirrels, and we haven’t seen that odd-lookin’ dog. Just don’t lets talk about groundhogs, and we’ll just pretend that I have Jake under control all the time.

Woof.

The hip x-ray. Super procrastinator strikes!

Hip x-ray from Wheeless' Textbook of Orthopaedics

Hmm. Okay, so when I went see Dr. John Bowman, a sports medicine doctor at Collingwood Sports Medicine back in October of 2011, he twisted my leg every which way to examine it and try and figure out where the stupid thing (not his words, obviously) was injured. All of this pushing and pulling led to pained groans from me, and looks of contemplation from him, and then eventually concluded with the acknowledgement that ‘there’s definitely something wrong with your hip’. Which wasn’t so, well, boneheaded (you know, from a doctor) as it seemed – basically, it seemed to me, he was saying ‘it’s not your knee, it’s not the leg muscles, and it’s not the IT band, per se, it’s your hip’. Sooooo he said the only way to really figure out what was going on was to get an MRI done. And before he could get the MRI ordered, he’d have to take a look at an x-ray.

Which I stupidly didn’t do. Yes. I put it off and it put it off and put it off.

You see, I would have gotten the x-ray done, but I had to get home first and get some work done (see about me: self-employed), and then I had to get more work done over the next few days, which led to the next few weeks and then for a while it seemed like my leg wasn’t bothered any more (which had way more to do with me not doing very much with it than it not being injured any more) and then all of a sudden it was more than a year later and I still hadn’t gotten the stupid x-ray done and I was having just as much trouble as ever with it. SIGH.

So ahem. I got in touch with the sports medicine office, and they re-sent the requisition for the x-ray. A week before Christmas. Which meant I didn’t actually get the x-ray done until January 3. But I did get it done. One year and two months after it was originally requisitioned.

Now, it’s waiting time – waiting for an MRI appointment. But, I’m like, a professional at waiting now. So no worries.

My stupid hip. My stupid 41 year-old hip.

Biking in Colorado, October 2009 -
a miraculous week of pain-free riding.

About three and a half years ago, in July 2009, I had a huge spasm of pain while trail running. I was about 6K into an 8K run, when – I have no other way to describe it – my right hip freaked out.

I hadn’t fallen, I hadn’t tripped, it was just a sudden – surge of pain, which stopped me utterly. As was my way back then, I gave it a minute or two of walk time, and then started running again. Which hurt, but wasn’t impossible – it was limpy sort of running, but it got the job done.

When I got home, I did what I usually did after a hot July run. I jumped into my cold, river-fed pond. Which, looking back, was probably a good thing to have done, a great way to keep the leg and hip mobile (through swimming) while icing it (the pond generally didn’t get above 60 degrees F – which, granted, isn’t precisely icy, but is certainly cold enough – the equivalent of a cold bath, really).

The rest of that day involved only super tentative movements, as it was clear my leg wasn’t working as it should.

The next day I could hardly walk.

It was impossible to pull my leg forward, almost as though I had no muscles in and around the hip/hip flexor area. I had definitely injured my hip, and the injury caused a lot of collateral damage. In this whole process, my IT band had also become injured, which meant that my knee also fell victim to this wretched injury.

And so began a very long process of foolishness.

Hindsight tells me I have certainly not treated this problem with the respect it deserves, as I have, since then, more or less had to give up my two favourite sports – running and mountain biking. Both sports cause a cascading series of problems with my leg – first a pain at the front of the hip, mid-hip-flexor region, then pain radiates into the deep middle of the glute, and then this weird tightening feeling happens, where it’s as though an elastic is being tightened from my hip to my knee, which then tightens - like crazy - around my knee. Sort of like a knee boa constrictor or something. In the moment, the pain’s never so much that I have to stop doing what I’m doing because it hurts too much. But the next day is usually a limper, sometimes so bad that, say, if I’m grocery shopping, it’s been nice to use the cart as a crutch. Sigh. So, even though I can get through a 5K run, or an hour mountain bike ride without trouble (more or less) – the next day – or two or three days – can be kinda excruciating.

The foolishness is that I thought it was the sort of problem that would just go away. I saw an Active Release chiropractor, who helped somewhat in the acute phase of the injury – she certainly kept me moving. But it took me two years to go to a sports medicine doctor, and even then, I neglected to get the hip x-rays required for assessment before I could be booked for what he diagnosed as a very necessary MRI.

I miss my bike. I miss running. Heck, I miss the associated chocolate. So, my goal for the next six months is to get back into the sports I love. To be precise: I want to be able to run without pain the next day, and I want to be able to ride without pain the next day.  I’m thinking accountability will be the way to keep me on track with this set of goals, so here we are in blog land.

I welcome comments, tips, feedback and suggestions. I’ll share with you the process that I’m going to go through, and hopefully you can share with me any useful thoughts you have as I go along. Not-so-useful but funny and/or encouraging comments are equally welcome, too.