After two falls at the end of last month, I took a week off leading up to March 5’s St Pat’s 10k.  My knees hurt, and I honestly had a lot of anxiety about heading back out again.  The week off was much needed, and I finished up a solid five books.

The race itself was slower than I wanted, but I was grateful to have L with me to talk.  She ran the double, and she killed it.  I had some nagging groin pain on my left side.  But I brushed it off, and kept moving.  The week after the race, I kept feeling the nagging pain during my runs on Tuesday and Thursday, and I was nervous going into the Rock and Roll Half on the 11th.

Let me tell you about this race.  I hate this race.  I don’t know why I run this race.  Just before the halfway point is Calvert Hill, and I have not yet beat that hill.  The back half of the race is pretty rolling, and it is a pile of misery.  Every time I finish this race, I swear that I will never run it again.  And then I register and we repeat the cycle.

If H hadn’t been waiting for me at the top of Calvert, I  would have been in trouble.  By mile 2, my groin pain had turned into moving hip/groin/quad pain.  And by the time I hit Calvert, I knew I wasn’t going to be able to actually run up the hill (that score is now Calvert: 3, Me: 0).  By the time I got to H, I didn’t know if I was going to be able to finish the race, and I definitely walked almost all of the uphills.  I wanted to cry from the pain. Knowing that my teammates were at Cowbell Corner just before mile 12 was probably the only thing that kept me in the race after mile 9.  Seriously, these ladies are the best.  I’ve never had so many cheers for me before.  I came out of the race with a 2:26:08.

The rest of my runs were hard, and they were painful.  To the point that I finally sucked it up and looked for a physical therapist on my insurance’s website.  I ended up at an orthopedist (I still don’t know how that happened), and he did some x-rays and put me on a 10 day course of prednisone in the hopes that it was just inflammation or a muscle strain.  And then he sent me off to PT.  My PT is great – she’s a runner, and she’s pretty involved.  She gave me some exercises to work on strengthening, but she told me to be aware that her initial evaluation suggested that my pain may be caused by a labral tear in my hip.

My follow up with my ortho was yesterday, and based on the fact that there was zero improvement on the prednisone (seriously, all I got out of it was a splitting headache and some seriously screwed up dreams), he’s sending me for an MRI arthrogram to look for that particular tear.  On the plus side, he was very specific about the doctor he wants to perform the test.  On the down side, I can’t get in until April 11.

My PT is allowing me to continue running as long as the pain doesn’t get worse or change – I’m to avoid anything that causes sharp pain, as opposed to the pinching feeling I’ve already got going on, and I’m to take walk breaks if I do start to feel crappy.  So, I’m working hard to keep up my mileage, and then I’ll see what happens when I get my MRI results back.  I’ve been trying not to panic too much about the fact that they’re going to have to stick a needle in my hip, but the needle-phobia has already started setting in.

In the rest of life, I’m off to San Francisco for work on Friday, and then on Tuesday, I get to head up to Sacramento to visit family before I have to come back to real life (and that MRI) on the 11th.  I’m definitely looking forward to seeing my grandparents, who will be just back from Israel, and my uncle, his fiance, and my cousins.  It should be a good almost week with them, and I’m planning on also getting my running in.  I was hoping to see my brother as well, but he’ll be out of the country for work.

I’ve been a book-devouring machine, though I’ve tapered off a little this week with the increased anxiety.  I’ve been trying to start The War that Ended Peace about 6 times, but I can’t seem to get further than chapter 1 before I’m putting myself to sleep.  So, I’ve been blazing through fiction:

• The History of Love by Nicole Krauss
• Frances and Bernard by Carlene Bauer
• Von Baum des Lebens by Hermann Hesse
• You Should Have Known by Jean Hanff Korelitz
• Room by Emma Donoghue
• The Madonnas of Leningrad by Debra Dean
• The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street by Susan Jane Gilman
• Two if by Sea by Jacquelyn Mitchard
• As I Descended by Robin Talley
• My Lady Jane by Cynthia Hand, Brodi Ashton, and Jodi Meadows
• The Book of Lost Things by John Connelly

Mostly, I’m just really looking forward to a few days off after this meeting.