Slow road to recovery.

Damn, this recovery stuff takes a long time.  And patience.  To be fair to my leg had been talking to me for weeks so there was a lot to fix. Even after I stopped working out, rested the leg, the pain would hang on. Finally a friend who is a personal trainer gave me some tough love: if it were a simple groin pull from CrossFit, it would have improved after 2 weeks of rest. Something else keeps those muscles tight. You have to find it. So I caved and visit my chiropractor. The adjustments got me to the point that I walked without limping but the soreness/weakness would always return.  Hmmm... Having a few normal days was very important because it gave me the space to consider all the options. What, exactly, was I doing before the pain returned?


Let me take a moment to emphasize the importance of a good training record.  Yeah, it might be a little annoying to track those workouts but memory is a funny thing.  We remember what we want to remember. If you really want to repeat that 5K PR or dissect that a crash and burn at your last tri, you need an unbiased record.  Training logs archive your training volume. They remember the order of your workouts each week. But it's more than that. In my case, it was the little whiny comments I made about my leg.  When did they start?  And once my leg started to heal, which workouts made it worse?  


And the answer shocked me: it's the bike.  Not all the running or heavy lifting (although I would feel the most pain during those workouts).  Looking through my training logs, this all came to a head after my bike was knocked over during a social ride. I had been riding that configuration for almost a year with no issues. The bike falls over and BANG, the references to groin strain starts. The most painful runs? The runs off the bike during a brick. Tuesday, I could actually feel a waddle in my stride at the start of the run.  No pain this time but a waddle was there that had been missing during Sunday's long run.


So now what?  Raising the saddle has helped but it's not perfect, as Tuesday showed. It might be professional bike fit time. Not my favorite option, because I'm a cheapskate. We'll see. As for the race on Saturday....normally I would not change the bike configuration before a race but Tuesday showed me that the current config will ruin my run split. I'll move the saddle a tad and go from there.