Well, I received my MRI results this morning. Going into the appointment, I was really hoping the scans would show something so we would know the cause and we could come up with a definite plan for recovery. Unfortunately, that’s not what happened. He said there is a small case of arthritis in my spine and some slight compression on a nerve. However, he couldn’t confirm it’s the cause of the pain in my leg and he suggested three options:
(1) Physical therapy – I’ve already been in physical therapy for six weeks and saw slight improvement, but not significant improvement.
(2) Steroid injection – This would only be a temporary solution and he wasn’t confident it would help.
(3) Wait and see – He said the pain started out of no where and could go away out of no where.
All said and done, I still have a lot of thinking ahead of me to come up with a plan. I’m confident I won’t consider the steroid injection, simply because it’s temporary and may not help resolve the issue. I’ll probably continue with physical therapy exercises at home and possibly see a chiropractor. I’ve been running every other day and will continue to run as long as the pain doesn’t increase in frequency or pain level.
Below is my mileage over the past few weeks. While it looks like I’m getting in some good mileage, the runs haven’t been pain free and 6-8 miles has pretty much been the threshold from a pain standpoint. I’ve tried resting and cross-training, but it seemed to make the pain worse. Not sure if it’s from the scar tissue in my hamstring or not. Oddly, yesterday’s run was the best feeling run and it was at a pretty good pace (splits of 7:22, 7:07, 6:44, 6:24, 6:25, 6:34) on some pretty good hills. Who knows, maybe I was trying to run from the pain and frustration.
So, for now, I’ll just keep on moving and see where it leads.
I guess finding nothing can be good news as well, it’s nothing TOO major then. But I hear you on the frustration part, you just want them to find something concrete so you can make a more definite recovery plan.
Nice last run, running away from your pain….I like that.
Keep focused, you’ll get there Mike.
Cheers!
By: Trailblaze on April 21, 2010
at 7:39 pm
I was very pleasantly surprised to see your run yesterday, as you certainly were moving well. It led me to think that you’re getting beyond things and moving significantly towards training again.
While it’s unfortunate that you’ve still got no real solution to your problems, it’s good to know you’ve progressed at least this far.
Hopefully the continued PT exercises help – It’d be great to see you back out doing what you do again.
By: Denny on April 21, 2010
at 8:28 pm
Sorry to hear that you didn’t get any definitive news. I hope whatever is causing your pain reveals itself soon so you can make a plan to deal with it.
By: Sean Brown on April 23, 2010
at 12:24 pm
Think you could have Piriformis Syndrome,
I had this for many years and tried lots of different treatments.
My cure came after seeing a new phsio in town, she told me I was using the small piriformis muscles instead of my large butt muscles when i ran, this caused the piriformis muscle to get over worked and become imflammed, this then caused the piriformis to press on the sciatic nerve and hence cause pain in my butt, hamstring, calf etc.
To cut a long story short, she recommended doing butt squeeze exercises to reactivate my butt muscles and take the stress off my over worked piriformis.
end result was very good, so it may be worth a try.
By: Rick on May 21, 2010
at 3:07 am
Think you could have Piriformis Syndrome,I had this for many years and tried lots of different treatments.My cure came after seeing a new phsio in town, she told me I was using the small piriformis muscles instead of my large butt muscles when i ran, this caused the piriformis muscle to get over worked and become imflammed, this then caused the piriformis to press on the sciatic nerve and hence cause pain in my butt, hamstring, calf etc.To cut a long story short, she recommended doing butt squeeze exercises to reactivate my butt muscles and take the stress off my over worked piriformis.end result was very good, so it may be worth a try.
+1
By: Way on June 28, 2010
at 6:03 am