Coming back

It has been a long process for me coming back from this particular injury. It hasn’t gone as well as it did last summer when I had IT band issues, but my PT thinks that’s because it was never really about my  IT band and my gluteus. More likely, it was about several different muscles not activating correctly. First, my left abdominals were not activating fully, and my left leg was not doing the same share of the work as my right leg (this is where the gluteus actually comes in). After working for a few weeks to correct that, I went back, and she discovered that my right Psoas muscle was not activating to swing my right leg forward during my left stance. 

If you’ve read this blog for a while, you might remember that, two years ago or so, I had  scare where several doctors thought that I had appendicitis, but in fact I had pulled my right Psoas muscle. The assumption now is that it never “restarted” after that injury. 

On the plus side, that means I have an actionable issue that I can work on. Combined with working on my left stance and working on my foot strike (always), I’m hopeful that I can get back to full on training in the next month or so. At the moment, I am running up to three miles, 2 out of every 3 days (though I sadly missed today, I will make up for it tomorrow). 

For the first time, though, I am attempting to put together a general long-term training plan. I’m using a variety of resources for this process. At the moment, I am focusing on “Training for the New Alpinism.” While it’s written for Alpine climbers, it has a lot of good general training information that I think will also be very useful for my running, including strength and technique training as well as general aerobic training suggestions. 

Adding to that, I’m going to incorporate the general structure from The Cool Impossible, at least for the first 12 weeks or so (which would constitute the Transition and some of the Base period of the Training for the New Alpinism plan). As I recall, it worked really well for me last time, and I’m hoping it can do some of the same for me this time as well. I’m hoping that with a little more cross training, in the form of biking and climbing, and a little more strength training, in the form of general strength training and climbing, I will be able to get through this year without any more injuries. 

My goals remain generally the same for the coming year. I’d like to get more actual racing in this year, primarily at the half marathon and lower distances. I want to keep my primary goal as the Border Route Trail, sometime in either the spring or the fall. Added to that, I definitely want to add in more self-propelled adventuring, now that I have a sweet bike that I had custom built. I would like to use that on my planned ascent (and subsequent descent) of Eagle Mountain in northern MN. 

At this point, I’m still a little discouraged, and I still go out on each run worried that my right leg might act up again. But I’m feeling more and more hopeful as the days go by and I don’t get the same seizing sensation that I got previously. There might just be hope for me yet.