Physio!

Working from home again so an early run today on my own.  Duncan dropped me off on Rivington Road (at the parking area at the bottom of Hordern Stoops).  I only went for a short one though as I had a lot of work to get through so wanted to make an early start.  I just ran along the road to the end of Belmont Road and then ran all the way along to the Pigeon Tower and along George's Lane, past Wilderswood then home.

It was cold!  The sun was shining when I left home and I had shorts on and a long sleeve top but no coat.   When I stepped out of my front door I thought it was quite pleasant but it wasn't until I got out of the car on the other side of Winter Hill that I realised how cold it was.  It was really windy on that side of the hill, which it wasn't on my side.  Needless to say, I ran pretty fast just to get warm so it turned out to be a really good, if short, session, leaving me pretty tired.

It's lovely running at that time of day when there are very few people around.  I only saw one person, who was sat out by the Pike trying to photograph birds.

Total distance - 4 miles

Hopefully Albert will read this as I have a question and I'm pretty sure he'll know the answer...

When running along George's Lane with the Pike on your left, you pass the gate to the field down to the farm on the Pike Race route on your right.  After that, there is then a kissing gate on your right.  Where does that go?  It just seems to have a steep stepped descent behind it but then I can't see where it takes you out and I haven't ventured down it yet to have a look.

Just lately, my glute/hip troubles, which have always been on my right side, have now appeared on my left side.  I can't decide whether it's just muscular or something more sinister, or both.  Some of it feels muscular and if I press on my glute it is tender, like the muscles are knotted.  However, I sometimes get an ache in the sticky out hip bone, which makes me worry a bit about arthritis.  I went for physio with Maria at lunch today and she thinks it is just a case of strengthening the glute muscles.

After some painful deep tissue massage, acupuncture and stretching exercises, I went home.  I had more of an in depth look on the internet about my injury and found the name of the bone that I get the pain in.  It's called the iliac crest and when I googled pain in it, it brought up lots of running related sites.  Funny because I hadn't mentioned running at all in my google.  A lot of what I read was pretty reassuring and, as Maria had said, was down to having to strengthen the muscles.  I did read a few things though saying that the pain in the iliac crest is very often caused by running on uneven surfaces, which actually ties in with when I first discovered the problem.  My originally hip injury came on after I started running off road all the time.  I never had a problem back in my road runner days.  I'd go into more detail on the reasons why off-road running causes this pain but, to be brutally honest, I can't be bothered so if you're interested, google it :)

I'm going to take a couple of days off running I think as the hip pain has really flared up and I'm going to concentrate on LOTS of strengthening exercises instead.  Hope I manage to sort it soon.