Injury Report

I have not been writing recently due to an injury (or combination if injuries) that I incurred following the 16 mile run on 8-11-07. I felt great all throughout the run and made it in a respectable time but when I woke up the following day I had a lot of pain in my left leg on the inside of my knee. I just wrote it off and figured it would get better and until then I would just hobble around. Felt a little better after my massage on Monday with Holly. She worked on it a little and said that she could feel some swelling on the tendons and that it was inflamed. Made an appointment with my sports doctor on Friday to get it checked out and hoped to be running the next week. By the time Friday rolled around, I was noticing tenderness in my right leg IT band and brought that up to him as well. He listened to my symptoms and poked at it a little before quickly diagnosing it as Pes Anserinus Syndrome. For those of you that are not doctors I will quote from the medical text that he gave me to read :
“The pes anserinus is the tendon insertion of three muscles of the thigh into the upper leg (tibia), just below the knee to the inner side of the front of the leg. Where the tendon attaches to bone, there is a bursa sack between the bone and tendon. The bursa functions like a water balloon to reduce friction and wear of the tendon against the bone. With this syndrome there is inflammation and pain of the bursa, tendon, or both.”
The paper he gave me to read is a couple of pages long so for the sake of time I will not continue with the exact quote. The doctor did think that since the IT band problem is in the opposite leg that I aggravated it by running on uneven surfaces (side of the road) where the curb and pavement meet. Sounds logical to me!
Treatment is simple with stretching daily (he gave me a few stretches to help), Advil 3 times a day and resting as not to continue aggravating it. He told me that I should not start running again until it felt better. Unfortunately it has been a while since I have been running and it was only a couple of days ago that I could walk without much pain.
I decided that it was time to start running short distances again after 2 weeks of recovery and “test the waters” to make sure that it was feeling better and not cause further aggravation. Did an extensive stretching routine after warming up and felt pretty good when I first started out. Well I made it about ¾ of a mile when I started feeling my IT band tightening up again to the point that I noticed that I had adjusted my stride to compensate. I stopped running and walked the ¾ of a mile back to the truck; a very disappointing start.
I have started going to the gym in addition to the stretching and can use the elliptical machine without any discomfort. The plan is (as of today) to try running again this Thursday…..wish me luck!