A week later I saw Stan James at Slocum. Stan is the man of diagnoses. He was the only one who properly confirmed my plica injury without an MRI. I trusted him and figured he'd know what the problem was and help me fix it.
Well, he didn't. He was baffled because we couldn't mimic the pain in the office. I said, "I can make it hurt if I walk up and down stairs." So off he sent me to climb stairs for awhile. Sure enough, 2 flights latter, my knee was throbbing. He assumed it was tendonitis of my semitendonosus and sent me off with a prescription for Voltaren. He told me to try running again in one week.
So I rested, stretched, applied creme, and waited. In one week I tried running again. This time I got 3 miles on a walk/jog style run. All 3 miles were painful.
So, I quit running. I decided to wait 6 weeks in case I did really have a stress reaction in my knee. In the meantime I continued with Pilates, but I noticed that I could not do the bicycle crunch, squats, or many leg extensions without a lot of pain. I also took a Yoga class and couldn't do many of the moves because they were so painful to my left knee.... and my left hip. Hmmm, I got to thinking, if I cannot do a basic straddle stretch without massive pain to my left hip, perhaps there's something greater going on here.
After 6 weeks of no running, I tried running again. I had sharp pain in my knee immediate from the first step. How was this possible? I just didn't understand. I decided to seek the opinions of some physical therapists. Their advice was helpful, but when I tried to apply it on a test run, the pain was still there. It was on one of these test runs, that I turned my head/body to the left to see if a car was coming up behind me and noticed my knee screamed at me even more.
Wait. Stop just there.
My brain began working like crazy. Maybe it wasn't me knee, or my sartorius, or my semitendonosus. Maybe it was my back. Specifically my SI Joint. When I got home from my run, I did some twisting exercises I had learned from the past to adjust my SI joint. The next day I went for a run...and had less pain.
I immediately made an appointment with Kelly. When I got to his office the next day, I told him I that I thought I had figured out what was wrong, but I wanted him to try to figure it out without my bias opinion. I told him to do a full body alignment check on me. Everything seemed to be normal, except when he had me sit at the edge of the table and bend forward, the bones in my right low back were slipping way up. He then noticed that laying down on the table, my right leg was a clear inch shorter than my left leg. After some work, we got everything back in place... and the rest... is history.
It took many weeks and I had to constantly work on adjusting my SI joint and to make it stay in place, but I began running pain free again. I also had full range of motion back in my hips and Pilates and stretching were no longer painful. You know the phrase, "hindsight is always 20/20". Well, looking back on things, it's obvious that my SI joint slipped out of alignment back on that "Toot Toot" run. I complained after the run of right low back pain. It was so bad, I could not sit in a car afterward. It hurt for 3 days and I thought I had bruised my back with my water-belt, but there wasn't a mark. A week later, Kevin made the comment to me while sitting on a park bench with my feet dangling, "Wow, your left leg is a lot longer than your right leg."
Sigh.
Anyway, coming back from this injury, I'm taking it really slow. I decided that I am going to focus on short distances for awhile and stop marathon/ultra marathon training. Hopefully I have better luck and this stupid alignment problem made me smarter.
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