I’m NOT currently injured. I’m just going through my blog and accidentally set this one to private, but it can stay public. I think it’s an interesting enough piece of context to Project 882. So, I’m just setting it to public which i think will notify anyone with notifications on. Sorry!!!!
Good Question!
‘Cause goodness gracious does that seem crazy! (And so unnecessary! And so annoying!)
Okay, to catch anybody up who doesn’t know the story (just skip past the lines if you don’t need the catch up).
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Around February of last year, my ankle was hurt at a half marathon. I thought maybe it was just normal soreness, or maybe pain I “deserved” or whatever because I’d gained some weight and I was like “I’m too heavy for my poor joints.”
Turns out my ankle was sprained… But I didn’t know it.
I did baby it a bit for a hot second. I cancelled a marathon entry I was supposed to do (a few of them, really). I dropped down distances. I took longer at races. And after a few weeks, I saw a foot doctor because the pain was so intolerable.
And he moved my foot around a little and was like, “it’s not broken. I think you’re fine. Get some comfy insoles.”
So, I just kept on forging ahead with my giant running project (which very quickly became a walking project, but still. Lots o’ miles on my feet.)…
Until finally, November rolled around, and I couldn’t walk any distance without a limp anymore. I saw an orthopedist out here in (beautiful) Los Angeles. He did an MRI and we found out I had [some fancy words, something something special ligament maybe? I don’t know]. The point is, they said it basically boiled down to a really bad sprained ankle. And because it was so bad and compounded by how long I’d been walking on it, I’d need physical therapy. We were beyond just hanging on crutches for a week or two or whatever.
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So, I started physical therapy…
My physical therapist is pretty dope. And I definitely am, in general, seeing improvement.
But.
We’re also seeing that there’s a lot of work to be done. Because not only do we have to rehab my right ankle, we have to rehab my whole right leg/hip!
(GAH!)
I’d been over-compensating for so long (many months now), that now my left leg is like a million times stronger than my right.
(Even a doctor unrelated to this stuff, when I had an appointment in December, asked me if I was left-handed because she noticed my muscle was, well, noticeably bigger (I felt weird about using noticeably twice so close together, but she noticed it because it was very noticeable to her!).)
But I am not left-handed. (And even if I were, the discrepancy probably wouldn’t be this big.)
Sometimes if I’m really struggling with a certain exercise, my physical therapist will ask me to try it on my left side just so we can see. And it’ll be a thousand times easier. I had no idea I was completely lop-siding myself.
So, we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us. It might be another 8 weeks (or more!) until I’m back to just normal – and I don’t mean the old “normal” of “ready to run a half marathon at a moment’s notice.” I mean, maybe being able to go to Bar Method without hurting myself.
So, my ankle is like the problem that never ends and it’s very hard (in my opinion, at least) to try to explain to people that a silly sprained ankle is becoming such a giant deal, and is the bane of my existence. But it is, and there you have it.