But it hurts

You might have been wondering why I haven't been writing much about my current running of late. That''s because I haven't been doing much running lately. You see, I am injured.

I went to the doctor's office Tuesday complaining about pain high up on the back of my left leg. For weeks I thought it was a hamstring injury, but there was no specific moment when the injury occurred. The pain just showed up a few days after my GW Parkway 10-Mile Race last month and got worse and worse. I finally decided that maybe the hip socket was inflamed.

My left leg is sore. It hurts. It affects my running. The pain wakes me up at night and I lie in bed, comfortably feeling nothing in my right leg while my left leg aches, high up around the hip.

It was diagnosed at the doctor's office as gluteal tendonitis, which is a repetition injury. It's inflamation of the tendons which attach the glutes to the thigh bone.

Now think back. The knee bone connected to the thigh bone, the thigh bone connected to the hip bone, the hip bone connected to... Somehow and somewhere the gluteal tendons get in on this.

Not so funnily, it takes a long time to get better.

As the LPN said while he was writing out an RX for PT, "I'm not going to waste my breath telling a runner not to run. You'll do what you want anyway, but you will be be managed by pain on this. So try to run smart."

Then he helpfully told me about how he was currently helping another patient deal with the exact same injury. They'd been at it for six months now.

My running has fallen off a cliff. It's been four weeks since I ran the 10-miler on April 22nd. That week I ran five times for twenty miles, including the race.

The next week I ran five times for 22 miles. But I also pulled up after running a block one morning and went home because of my "hamstring."

Then I cut back to doing only scheduled runs so my ailment could get better. I ran twice last week for 4.7 miles. Once was with the noontime group I lead at work, and the other time was last Saturday at the last class of the 10K Training Program I coach for. I ran a 3K while the rest of the group went 8 miles in preparation for tomorrow's race.

This week I have only run twice for 3.3 miles. Wednesday was the monthly noontime Tidal Basin 3K race. I couldn't miss that, especially since it was the 400th running of it. My time was normal for how I have generally been running for the last year, 12:58 (6:57).

Instead of running there as I usually do, I walked the two and a half miles from work and I caught a ride back. BTW, sub-seven minute miles will land you solidly in the lower half of the finishers in that race. I was 40th out of 75 runners. Check your ego at the start line for that race.

Today I ran a mile and a half. I had to, because this date has been circled on my calendar for a year now. It has to do with the Triple Crown and the Navy. I'll tell you about it in another post.