Thursday, July 29 — Since that last entry about the hip pain returning, I initially thought it might have been more of a groin pull. The hip started feeling better after a few days of avoiding hard workouts and skipping speedwork for a while.
Now I’m not so sure. The hip is certainly aggravated by hard workouts and it’s been generally more sore than usual for at least a month. I’ve got the marathon clinic on week three of hill workouts and I’ve been pretty sore afterwards. I’ve been riding my bike more, taking the girls day camp and summer school every day and I feel it on the bike too. I even feel it when I go to bed and when I first wake up. The bottom line is my hip is not happy right now.
On Friday/Saturday I paced Tim at the Fat Dog 100k. It was a long day and making matters worse, the course was about 20k too long. Tim finished in just under 20 hours and I was with him running, hiking and cheerleading for over 60k and nearly twelve hours of it including a lot of hard climbing and descending. My hip felt stiff at times but was generally manageable, though our pace didn’t really test it. The hip certainly wasn’t my number one issue out there.
I ran 23k with the clinic on Sunday and was generally stiff. The hip wasn’t great but again, it didn’t really stand out.
I took Monday and Tuesday off and we had a fairly tame 10k yesterday though there was a little bad behaviour coming over Burrard Bridge. The hip was stiff and a bit sore afterwards.
Today I could feel the muscles in my hips and butt were quite a bit tighter than usual, certainly not the way I want to go into a tough hill workout.
Tonight we did seven reps on Nanton Avenue, the 600m beast between Arbutus and Marguerite. My reps were in the 2:35-2:38 range, so I was working pretty hard. I couldn’t feel the hip itself during the reps, but my butt/upper hamstrings on both sides were sore and my right achilles was burning a little. After standing around cheering for everyone to finish and regroup, the hip really tightened up and the easy 2k run back to the Running Room was very uncomfortable. I ran down to London Drugs and back on the way home and it was even worse. It was bad enough that I trouble walking without a slight limp while I was at LD.
If roasted turkeys could feel pain, I imagine my hip feels like the turkey’s hip after someone has wrenched a drumstick from its carcass. The pain is all around the joint, from the groin around the front and across the back of my butt. I don’t remember it ever being worse than this before the injection.
It’s been a tough week of running so I’ll have to see over the next week or so if there’s any improvement or if I should start buying lottery tickets in order to pay for another injection.
Friday, July 30 — Okay, it’s calmed down a bit, but the hip still feels like I’ve put it through the ringer. Making matters worse, the ITB pain I felt outside the right knee last night didn’t go away after a bit of icing and a night’s rest. So, including the inflamed achilles, I’ve pretty much got every joint in my right leg accounted for.