Good ol’ gluteus medius. After putzing around last week and feeling sorry for myself, I’m feeling much more productive and “myself” this week. This can only be due to the fact that I’m actually sticking to some sort of cross-training routine and have seen the PT twice in 3 days.

Having never been to a physical therapist previously, I wasn’t sure what to expect. So far, it’s been a lot of heating pads, deep tissue massage of my left hip, and fun exercises on the pilates reformer machine. Not too shabby! Mike (Mr. PT) thinks that it’s just a matter of time before my hip lets go, the tenderness goes away, and I can begin to run strong again. I’m doing all that I can to stay active because, let’s be honest, if I’m not active I don’t know who the hell I am—not to mention the crazy pent up energy that has to be channeled in other ways.

I’m sticking to easy spinning in the dark spin room by myself (which is oddly therapeutic) and some vinyasa yoga. Today, though, Mr. PT said that he thinks that yoga is too challenging on my hips and actually has “compressed” them. I’m not shocked by this especially because of all of the deep lunge work you can do especially in the Warrior poses. On Monday, he encouraged me to continue going to yoga as an “experiment” to see how my hips would feel afterward and we decided that experiment failed. So, I’ll switch to spinning and elliptical more than anything else for the next few weeks.

On Friday or Saturday, I’m going to go for my first short “test run”. A tender gluteus medius apparently isn’t going to show itself during a run because of the range of motion used. When I first started to realize it was sore, the ache always showed up after a run. Here’s to hoping that weird ache stays away post-run on Friday!

I’ve scheduled a one-hour PT session every week for the next 3 weeks to work through the small amount of discomfort I’m dealing with. I’m on the up and up. All in all, I’m feeling confident about getting back to it soon. Until THEN, I’ll continue to wallow in retail therapy and large purchases of running gear online. What else is a girl to do?!

-J