First ride of the year. Also, first ride in 3 years without pain.

On Sunday, I went for a bike ride. And it was awesome. It was very short - perhaps 30 minutes. It was mostly gravel trail, with a bit of single-track and some nice rooty climbing, so it was super easy. But it was perfect. Perfect because my leg didn't hurt within five minutes (which is its usual habit) and even perfect-er because it didn't hurt after 30 minutes, or the next day either.  It truly was the first ride I have had in three years that didn't hurt in any way. Which, on Sunday, was nearly tear-inducing - but ended up being beer-inducing, which is to say, I celebrated  in the sunshine with a cold bottle of, well, beer. 

And, even better, on Monday morning, I had a great workout, which involved split squats and glute bridges and hamstring curls and other exercises which would have ordinarily caused serious leg complaints following a ride (or run) - but didn't - which was cause for more celebration. This time without beer (workday, after all).

I am hopeful. 

I am, actually, more than hopeful. I am energized. I am totally thrilled to have found a way back into biking - which I really must credit to the workouts designed by Steve Neal. His insistence on perfect form and on developing genuine core and hip stability seem to have made all the difference. 

And so today I am going for (oh me oh my) another bike ride. Similar to Sunday's ride (in fact, probably identical). My toes are crossed that it will be another pain-free ride.

This one's for my dad.

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I was thinking a lot about my dad yesterday. This is because yesterday was the three year anniversary of his death. He died at age 64, from cancer, at Southlake Hospital in Newmarket. This year was the first year I was able to think about that time without being overcome with abstracted grief.  The kind of sadness and grief that made me, on the first year anniversary of his death, reverse my wee VW – at reasonable speed – into the back of a sturdy (and enormous) pickup truck. I was certain that I had checked and double-checked to make sure there was nothing behind me, but I was, more or less, blinded by sadness. One smashed taillight (mine) and dented rear-hatch (also mine) later, I realized it was probably not safe for me to be driving on that day. (There was no damage to the pickup truck that I could see. He or she never responded to my apologetic note, either, so I assumed my assessment was accurate.)

My dad was so proud of me, and he told me often. He was proud of me for getting my university degree, for finding a career that gave me both creative and monetary satisfaction, and for my general independence. But he was also so proud of me for being athletic. I was born quite premature, and the doctors (so my dad told me) said that even if I survived brain-intact, I would never be able to achieve physically.  Something about my lungs and their less-than-optimal functioning.  So he was always so thrilled to hear about how much I loved running and cycling, and would make a point of telling me that that I was never supposed to be good at either of those things.

I miss you Dad. Just so you know, I am working hard to get back on my bike. I’m keeping busy with working out, just to make sure these lungs of mine stay in shape for the moment my leg is ready to bike again.

Deadlifts, resistance bands and BOSU balls.

Because reading about workouts is boring, but mountain
biking is always fun. Plus, it IS the point of this blog.

Okay, so the Functional Movement Screen showed me to be ‘hypermobile’ and ‘lacking in strength’ – to which I said ‘bah!’ – as I may be particularly bendy but I would never say that I am not strong. Anyway. After a bit of back and forth in which I challenged the above assessment, I warily signed up for a session with Steve Neal, along with my good buddy Jodi.

And I know it’s super boring to read about other people’s workouts, so I won’t get into too much detail about the ins and outs of this one. There were (yep) deadlifts, resistance bands and BOSU balls, and a nifty ankle strength exercise and some neat kettle bell stuff and overall about 25% new-to-me stuff which was great. The rest of the workout was stuff I’ve done before, which was also pretty great – primarily because Steve is a real stickler for proper form and, it seems, for drilling the idea into your head that just because you’re doing, say, a deadlift  - doesn’t mean you’re only using your legs for proper form, you’re also using your core AND your cardiovascular system. This applied to (honest to god) every exercise we did. We paid a lot of attention to breathing. Which sounds sorta dopey, but I really was made to feel very conscious of taking a deep breath at the start of the exercise, and releasing it as I progressed through, particularly in the deadlift, where apparently it’s going to come in real handy when the weights get heavier and heavier. Woot.

The good news is, apparently I don’t lack strength after all. Or at least it didn’t seem so to me. I’ll have to ask Steve when I see him again on Thursday. And woohoo, in the even more good news department, so far, my leg doesn’t hurt any more than it usually does (which is always a teensy tiny little bit). Which is, you know, nice.

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.

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.