Yes, those are three words no runner wants to hear. So on the 20th of November, I felt some pain on my left hip. Not your normal pain but sharp aches right under the hip bone. I thought nothing of it and took off the next couple of days and hit the bike instead. Well, after several weeks of running and not running, it just didn't go away. On December 19th, I got a an MRI w/contrast - this is a procedure when they inject die into your hip and conduct a MRI to see if there were any tears in you hip labrum, stress fracture, or something else. Well, it came back to with two tears, one at 7mm and one at 13 mm. Additionally, it looked like I had some FAI going on too but the radiologists said it "may" be present (who fucking knows). Furthermore, I have some hamstring and hip bursitis happening which may be the overall cause of my pain but don't know. The symptoms I was getting was pain on the left hip (lateral side) and was also getting pain in the inner groin of the left hip. All this was happening after runs longer than 4 miles and while sitting all day - yes, it sucks.
So I set some appointments up with orthopedists in Northern VA and DC, one on January 6th and the other on January 16th. In the meantime, I have been getting physical therapy and doing hip strengthening exercises which have really been helping alot. One of the things I have learned is that alot of people can have hip labrum tears but are not symptomatic. Through two strong weeks of the myrtl routine, the symptoms have dissipated and the pain has pretty much gone away...not totally but I can tell that it is working. For instance, yesterday I ran a impromptu 5k (22:29 - 7:15 pace) run down at Emerald Isle, NC while on vacation...my first mile was 7:32, second was 7:12, and the last was 7:03 for a nice tempo run. As far as the pain is concerned, I really didn't feel any at all which is quite amazing. Today, I ran a 4 mile run and the only thing that was tight was my knees. I might do something light tomorrow, then rest on Tuesday and try the Resolution 5k on January 1st, 2014...I would like to feel optimistic but I haven't run more than 10-15 miles per week for the past 4 weeks which sucked.
Hi labgeek,
ReplyDeleteOut of curiosity has your hip/labrum pain reappeared since you've posted?
Chris
Hey Chris - so after the MRA in November 2013 I hit the PT work on my left hip pretty hard. I ended up seeing Dr. Parker here in Northern VA and he said the tears were small enough and the flexibility was pretty good that surgery was an option only if I really wanted it. I spent a month rehabing the left hip hard doing myrtle exercises, heavy core work, and hamstring strengthening which seemed to help me out alot. However, I am actually dealing with a tweak in the right hammy with a marathon coming up next week, that is a blog post for another day! All in all, I have upped my miles during the year but hit the hip exercises hard all year and have not had a big issue. He did say that he may want look at the tears at the end of the year and see if they got any bigger but I have not had the severe pain there that much during the year. I do notice that when I layoff the exercises on the left hip, it begins to ache. Do you have a hip labrum tear?
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