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A Taste of my Own Medicine: Training For a Marathon Update

I hurt myself a lot.  This is inevitable when you push your body to the limits doing ridiculous things like tough mudders and marathons, or playing sports.  Whenever I do, I try to always take it as a good opportunity to put myself in my patient’s shoes so I can become a better practitioner.

 

This time when I was training for a marathon my left knee started to hurt with the increased distance, forcing me to limp around for a couple of day and miss 2 weeks of vital training.  As a practitioner, I went through the typical assessment on myself as best I could, trying to figure out biomechanically what was wrong.  When that fails, get professional help (self diagnosing is nearly impossible even for someone who kind of knows what they are doing).  So with the help of a good team I realized my adductor muscle was really tight placing pressure on my knee, due to weak hip and core muscles.

 

My colleague performed acupuncture and active release technique on all the worst spots, making me question why people let me do this to them.  After each treatment I felt better and better (which is why people let me do it to them too).  Here is what I learned from the process:

 

1 – The mental side of any injury is probably the hardest.  What if it doesn’t get better? I am missing time training (or playing sports, or going to work etc.), I am going to fall behind.  Stop to realize that you can only control so much, and it was up to me to do whatever necessary to fix it.

 

2 – This chiropractic / acupuncture / active release / rehab exercise stuff really works.  Two weeks after I was limping around for 2 days I was back running 10 km pain free.  This took diligent treatment and daily rehab exercises, but it turns out this stuff actually works.  A good reminder of why I do what I do, and why I love it.

 

3 – Pay attention to the early warning signs of tightness, fatigue and soreness.  My knee had been a bit tight previous to the injury, and with the increased demand of more miles it became a problem.  Listening to your body, getting preventative and early treatment is something I always tell people to do because it saves time and aggravation.  In hindsight, I should have seen this coming based on early warning signs.  My own advice comes back to bite me in the ass (as per usual).

 

4 – Everything is connected.  The knee pain was on my previously repaired ACL surgery knee, right beside the huge scar left over from the surgery.  The surgery was 5 years ago, but clearly I had some subtle weakness and imbalances that showed up when put to the test.

 

– Dr. Rob Green

1 Join the Conversation

  1. Dennis says
    Apr 11, 2017 at 9:46 PM

    Thanks for this Dr. Rob, very useful and meaningful. I agree, the mental part is the hardest.

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