Way back before the Great Blog Famine of 2010, I wrote about some of the physical therapy that I had been going through.  Since that post in early May, I’ve had a rough go of it with the therapy.  After about three or four visits with no improvements regarding my knee or shin pains, my therapist called in the Head Honcho from the facility.  After some poking, twisting, stretching, and watching, he finally came to the conclusion that I’m crooked.  There’s a really cool medical explanation behind what is going on, (seriously. It’s pretty neat if you like nerdy biology stuff) but the gist of it is that when I run, my hips twists really well to one side, but not the other.  All of the pain is from my body compensating in some manner to keep me stable.  Again, it’s really cool medical stuff with some really big names, but I don’t remember them all.

Not runningIn early July, I started work on realigning my body to where my hips can rotate as they should.  But we couldn’t get everything how it was supposed to be.  So, we twisted, stretched, poked, and looked some more, and the root cause ends up….and some of you ladies probably already knew this…that I have a really tight butt.  That’s right.  The muscles in my posterior were so tight that I wasn’t flexible enough to twist. We shifted my routine and exercises to loosen up the correct muscles, but up through the first of this month, we were seeing very little change in my flexibility.

Until today!  Not only did I get a good report and respond well to the physical tests, I went running this past weekend for the first time in about a year with no shin or knee pain.  As a reward, my therapist told me that I have just a few more exercise to master and that these are the “really hard ones.”  How exciting!  Wait….”really hard ones?”  Man, this stinks.