About a month ago, I had what I believed at the time was a recurrence of an injury I'd gotten from falling down a set of stairs sometime during 1999. The result of drinking too much at a party that my roommate and had I thrown (a trailer-trash them party), it was far from my finest hour.The injury was something that my doctor had previously classified as a "butt-sprain," since it was a spasm of one of the muscles that attaches the butt to the lower back--which muscle to be specific, I don't know--but at least my doctor had a sense of humor about the whole thing. I'd written off the recurrence of that injury as a random, every-once-in-a-while event that happens every few years. It knocked me completely out of training for a week, and then took the better part of 2 weeks for me to return to full force.
So, fast forward to yesterday, and it's back again. Truth be told, it started coming back on me on Thursday, and I blindly and stubbornly ignored it, and went ahead training anyway. I've been having a string of good workouts, and I could not believe that this was going to sideline me--history dictated that the recurrence of this thing was once every few years, not a couple of weeks.
The reality is that I now believe this injury is caused (or at least mostly caused) by my phenomenal inflexibility. I can't touch my toes. OK, I can touch my toes, I just have to bend my knees (a lot) to make it happen. I need to use a strap to be able to pull on my toes when doing a typical hurdle stretch. When I went to my bike fitting, my bike fitter evaluated my flexibility as "low," and I think it's only because he didn't have a lower category to put it into. If you're looking for a bike fitter--call Jim Manton at Final Fit in Fountain Valley--he's awesome.
So, I'm going to stop causing myself insanity. Specifically, I'm going to stop expecting my body just to take care of this because I don't like it even though I really don't do anything about it. I'm going to adopt a nightly stretching routine, and get back to the level of flexibility I had when I was a kid. OK--I may never be able to do the splits again (I was a gymnast as a child), but I should be able to touch my toes. It's less severe than it was a month ago--I'm hopeful that today's massage, some rest, and a good whopping amount of ibuprofen will allow me to get back to some level of training tomorrow. But even if I can't, I'm not going to let this repeat again.
