Hurt by My Ambition and Ignorance

I did it again. I forgot history and pushed ahead spurred on my ambition and I hurt myself. Yep, another running overuse injury. My right hip has some sort of problem. It hurts to run. It is going to require taking it easy and all sorts of less than extremely fun exercises in my basement and probably at a gym strengthening my weak non-dominant muscles.

Our bodies are full of muscles and many of then are relatively small and weak yet very important to maintain things like knee cap orientation. I am biomechanically very very durable. I have only broken one bone in my body ever, a sesamoid bone on my right foot. I am able to tolerate huge amounts of running mileage. Yet, despite the fact that my running stride is fairly nice, it is not perfect, nor will it ever be. A fraction of a degree out of alignment in the way that I push off of the ground will add up to thousands of pounds of imbalance over the course of several weeks. That will lead to some muscles getting stronger and other getting weaker. Eventually one or more of those weak muscles will break, in some manner of speaking, and I will be in pain or at least unable to run the way I want to.

I did not really do any weight lifting or core exercises for about seven weeks. During that time I averaged over 100 miles a week. In an effort to be "awesome" or achieve some other random goal I bumped up my mileage and ran 160 miles in nine days. It was too much and my body broke.

This is hardly a new learning experience. It is just another reminder of what I have already learned, and promptly ignored. I feel like an idiot. It takes half an hour a week to maintain strong weak muscles and despite running over 15 hours last week I didn't take the time to do 30 minutes of work to prevent this. Now I am reduced to a few miles a day fairly slow until I am strong enough to handle more. Awesome.