Back during the chaos of Christmas I got an appointment with yet another sports doctor. At this point my insurance company probably thinks I’ve got some kinky thing for sports doctors when the reality is I just like to hang and check out the patients. The muscular, athletic patients who probably never replace the toilet paper roll in their daily lives BUT THAT’S NOT MY PROBLEM. I’m just sitting back, enjoying a living, breathing 2012 quarterback calendar.
This was by far the most detailed exam I’ve experienced since I incurred all these running injuries, and yes, that sounds dirty. But stop your mind from going down that drain, SON. My older child was in the room. In fact, she was sitting on the floor writing a book. Yeah, go back and read that sentence and then compare it with the fact that she chose to do that rather than bring a portable gaming system to keep her occupied. Those characters were not going to develop themselves, MOTHER.
This doctor had me perform several exercises in front of him, and then he inspected the alignment of my hips and spine. I balanced on my right foot, then my left, touched my nose with my index finger and then sang the national anthem in pig latin. Dude was thorough.
Turns out my right glute is not firing. Well, DUH. Blame those liberals and their gun laws!
He thinks this is the primary cause of all my injuries. The right side of my butt is so significantly weaker than the left side that my alignment is visibly disrupted. Yeah, yeah, yeah, go ahead. Make a joke about my butt. And I’ll laugh about it as soon as your mom stops texting me photos of her boobs.
Diagnosis: IT band syndrome, specifically where the IT band lines the outside of my knee. Could last another week. Could last indefinitely. In the meantime I’m supposed to seek physical therapy and cease all exercises that exacerbate the pain. Those include: running, spinning, walking, breathing, living. Also, no more hacky sack with the neighbor who grows weed.
(All of my neighbors just glanced around to see if anyone is looking.)
I continue to go to the gym, but gone is the endurance I spent two years developing. I don’t have to tell you how hard it is for me to heed his advice, to stick to really low impact exercises, and if I knew my trainer wouldn’t find out I’d go to spin class and just ignore the pain. Which is what got me into this mess in the first place, but since when have I ever made money off of writing about all my reasonable behavior?