Minor setback, but moving forward

Friday and Saturday last week were not good for me. Specific pain came back to SI joint on my 1 minute run on Friday, and stayed with me through Saturday. Not cool.

How could this happen? Was it because of my biking? I had biked for a good amount of time Monday through Wednesday — was that causing the area to re-inflame? I decided to shut everything down for a couple of days. No walking, no trying to run, no biking, etc. I went back on a higher level of ibuprofen, and stretched a ton.

After thinking about it, I realized that it maybe wasn’t the biking that caused the flare-up after all. I think it was actually the mile long walk/jog in heels on Friday afternoon to get to Nate’s graduation ceremony. I went with Nate’s parents, and wasn’t able to keep up well in new heels. So every 10 feet or so, I’d fall behind and have to run/scurry back up to them. Although that didn’t hurt at the time, I’m pretty sure that’s what irritated the hip. At least I’m hoping 🙂

So I’m back on the cross-training wagon, with a very careful eye on my running progress. I obviously don’t want to bike now and risk postponing the running any more.

Monday I went in to the chiropractor again. Huge movement this time. We talked for a long time about what’s good/not good to do. I asked about biking, pool running (someone who reads my blog gave me an article on that — and they’ve tried it with great success), etc. At this point I think he’s a little baffled by my case & he basically just said that I can do whatever doesn’t make the joint worse, with the caveat that doing too many cross training activities makes it hard to point to what’s actually causing things to heal/not heal. True… so what’s best to do? I like the biking thing because I have one in our basement. I can go whenever, for however long, and don’t have to worry about other people/the place closing/etc. I’m intrigued by the pool running idea — the woman who gave me the article said she did all of her training in the pool for a long time, then was able to get one long run on the roads in before a marathon and was able to pull of a 3:05. It’s a good way to keep that running-specific muscle memory.

The other option is double poling. It’d be great to put some hours on the skis. I did one session a few weeks ago and the chiropractor didn’t particularly like it. He likes the motions where you’re using more running specific motions. Double poling is using your hips more as a hinge.

So… what to do. Little bit of everything? Like I said, that makes it hard to know whether one activity is good/bad. I think biking doesn’t make it worse — stick with that? I’ve almost (!) come to like biking. Should I add pool running? Double poling?

Wish I knew exactly what to do!

P.S. I ran for 5 MINUTES last night! 1×2 minutes, 1×3 minutes. Slight pain down the leg on the injured side, but not too bad! 🙂