Back on Track

1,050 days. It had been 1,050 days since I last raced on the track. That streak has finally come to an end thanks to a 1,500m/5,000m double at SFSU's Johnny Mathis earlier today. The times were slow (1,500m was ~6sec off PR, 5,000m was ~37sec off PR), but given my last 2+ years I'm pretty pleased.

My last time racing on the track was a 3,000m at altitude in April 2014, where I was trying to get a little prep work ahead of a 10,000m PR attempt in June. An ill-timed cold threw a wrench in that plan, making me bail on the target race and ending that track season. (Can you call one meet a "season"?)

Attention then turned to the marathon debut in December... the one that went so bad it prompted the start of this blog. And while I didn't know it at the time, it also led to me getting a sacral stress fracture. (I broke my back from running - sounds kinda badass when you put it that way!)

Rehab and hella cross-training got me decently fit come summer 2015. Unfortunately it all came to a halt on July 12th. While finishing a long run down Magnolia Road I all of a sudden felt a "pop!" in my hips/low-back. Discomfort came and went with me unable to pinpoint what was wrong or even where exactly the pain was. Very, very stupidly I kept training far too hard for far too long, eventually just destroying my right hip/glut. Turns out that pop was a labral tear. No good.

While lots of runners have labral tears of varying degrees that they don't even know about, I'd clearly put myself in a place where it was significantly impacting training. After finally getting an MRI to confirm the diagnosis, I started massive rehab for quite some time. Not to bitch and moan, but there was a time when all I was allowed to do aerobically was swim with a buoy. I would not wish that on my worst enemy! Seriously, it makes aqua jogging seem fun. Anyways, I digress...

My right hip hasn't felt normal since the labral tear. That's not an exaggeration. I feel hip discomfort/"off-ness" every damn day, and I expect this to be the case for as long as I continue to run. But, thanks to a lot of help (Brad Hudson, Kristin Carpenter, Richey Hansen, and others) and trial and error, I've been able to manage things so that I can finally train. While there are many days when I spend more time on rehab/prehab/core/what-have-you than running, I'm finally getting back to real running.

After months and months of 0-60mi weeks, 2017 is off to a solid start. Assuming tomorrow goes to plan, this will be week 9 of 100+mile weeks. After 993 days without spiking up, I've done two workouts in spikes in the last 2 weeks. True they were short and slow (closed my 1,500m faster than any 400m I've run since 2015), but it's something! While the workouts aren't there yet, not even close, I'm starting to get fit. When that'll start to pay off in races I don't yet know. But I do know that it's a great feeling being back on track!