Haven't been here for awhile. Like most, I have been out getting on with life. I just wanted to post this photo of how I celebrated my 1 year anniversary. It wasn't fast and it wasn't pretty, but it was great to get back out there. This distance is a bit much for only running again for 5 months prior but I also did an Olympic Distance race a couple of weeks later that went very well.
I don't really recommend doing half-iron distance (half-marathon run) so soon as my soft tissue was pretty sore for a couple of hours afterwards. All was fine that evening.
I had pretty much no pain or soreness after the short race, so I will stick with that until year 2.
Going for 1 year follow-up xrays and blood tests this week. I am keeping my fingers crossed but have no worries since things seem to be going so well.
Hope all of you are doing well and for surface hippies to be, Dr. Su is the greatest!
Kirk - That is an outstanding update. Congrats to you for getting your life back. Thanks for posting.
Boomer
Kirk, that is great! congratulations and keep it up.
Hey Kirk - Awesome to read. Keep it up.... and keep us posted!
Cherz
Kiwi
Now where is that like button?
Chuck
Awesome Kirk! Well done mate!
Hey Kirk...I did see your results and was wondering how it went for you. Glad all is well.
I've got my first tri this Sunday, then a 70.3 in August. I'm a definite for HI70.3 next year, hope you will be returning...Best...D.
Awesome job Kirk! Keep up the good work!!
spencer
Thanks all. Don't think it was a walk in the park (even though a lot of the run literally was). Again, I will emphasize that, although the swim and bike are well within reason, the half-marathon run distance was certainly too much for this amount of time, at least for me. But it sure was great to be back in the game.
David -
You are on, brother! I hope to be back in shape by then. I felt like the Pilsbury Doughboy out there after nearly two years off. I kept looking behind me trying to see the anchor I was dragging. Turns out it was my own a$$!
Nice job. That's excellent.
Kirk-
Congratulations! You are an inspiration.
I did a sprint tri just before 9 month mark. It went well but I had definite soreness in the hip area during the second half of the run.
I have been slowly working back into running shape. I have had a few setbacks but nothing major. Some calf tightness and hip/IT/gluteous soreness. But I can feel myself getting there.
Who knows, maybe I will join you and David next year.
Dan
Good Luck Kirk
Great to hear from you. Wishing you many more years with your hip resurfacing.
Pat
Dan -
That would be great! C'mon all tri-hippies. It will be a metal-on-metal showdown on the lava fields.
Or, anyone and everyone is welcome to head over and sip foo-foo drinks under a palm tree!
Now THAT sounds fine. I'll be in the foo foo line ;D
This is the event site. Just an enticement in case anybody is interested in picking out a tree ahead of time. ;D
Great news to hear Kirk!
I'm very pleased to hear this Kirk. I noted that you indicated you began running again 5 months earlier, or about 7 months post-op. I know you've championed a very conservative approach to higher stress activity so I'd be curious to know what sort of training program you developed.
I guess you could call it conservative in the "6 months to run" camp. In the "one year to run" camp, it is aggressive. Just depends upon your surgeon's protocol.
After starting to "run" at 7 months and now being right at 13 months, I understand a bit better both sides of the coin.
I went EXTREMELY easy for the beginning. First, you have to understand that up to that point, I had gotten my long walk up to 6 miles at a very brisk pace every couple of days and was also swimming 2500 meters a couple of days a week and cycling up to 50 miles per ride a couple of days a week. That is all fine and good for general health, but, for me, did NOTHING to prepare the soft tissue for the stresses of running.
At 7 months, I ventured out to try to start running. I would warm up with a walk of a mile to mile and a half and then jog for only 50 yards or so. Then back to walking for a few minutes. Then another short jog, and so on for a total of around 5 miles.. In the beginning this was long walking and just some occasional light jogs for a VERY short distance.
Over the months, I would bring the running distance up a little every couple of weeks. At a couple of months into the running, I started doing 1 minute run, 1 minute walk (after a long warm up walk) for a couple of miles. That would push it. Every time, it would get sore, but some days it would be just the soft tissue complaining and some days it was pretty bad and refused to cooperate. I iced my entire bum, and upper thigh by wrapping big ice packs all around it EVERY TIME. ICING IS CRITICAL FOR RECOVERY!
Since I needed to stretch out the distance for the upcoming event and there was no way I was going to run the whole thing (I couldn't run over a quarter mile at a time without walking), I simply walked a lot more and ran a little more in the sessions.
I had days where I could hold an easy run during the sessions for up to 3 miles, but these sessions were irregular and unpredictable. There were good days and there were bad days. By 11 1/2 months out from surgery, I got the whole thing up to a long distance of 13 miles once a week and 6 mile short sessions in between. The 13 at that point was WAY TOO MUCH. Although I did have some good sessions right before the race where I ran a lot of 1, 2, and 3, mile segments in the long session, there were some really bad ones in there too. I could feel that I was just pushing too much too soon and resigned myself to doing mostly walking in the event run portion and allowing another year of working on it before I could go out and really push.
In retrospect, I would definitely do the first 7 months of my rehab exactly the same way. The difference would be that when I started running again, I would have stretched out the very short jog period for at least another 3 months. I would have then doubled the time to gradually slide up the distance and run segment intervals. To simplify, what I did in 5 months (7 through 12) I would stretch out to 12 months (7 through 19).
The one other thing is that I have read from other hippies that the illopsoas and psoas can be very painful after this surgery when pushed to come back and will cause exactly the deep tissue soreness that I keep getting. A deep tissue expert / specialist in resolving this is reported to help tremendously. I blew off PT because I could tell they weren't specifically knowledgeable about this operation and were appying a template treatment that was going to actually do damage (like those leg lifts early on which are a big NO NO).
Hope that gives some helpful info, but remember the standard disclaimer: Everyone is different so PLEASE listen to your body and don't take others experiences as the way it should go for you. The body is usually pretty good at telling us what we need to do. We just suck at listening much of the time. I have the listening part down pretty well, now I just need to learn to stop arguing with it so much. ;)
Kirk that's some good info on starting running again. Out of interest have you done any sprint interval training? As when I return to running I intend on lowering the number of miles I run by doing intense intervals as opposed to the long runs I used to do. I always found the 800m sprints to be great for fitness!
To be honest, I can't imagine doing any kind of interval training or speed work. That kind of stress would make the tissue completely flip out. When I try to run harder than an easy pace, that is when it goes straight into irritation / inflammation / pain mode.
From what I have read about the soft tissue pain, it is caused by over-driving the psoas, illiopsoas, attachments, etc before they are ready and causing them to react by becoming highly inflamed and irritated. I would think that intense intervals would be the last thing you would want to do when trying to ease the soft tissue back from surgical damage and atrophy. Maybe you are different or maybe my approach is backward and short hard bursts would be more effective.
After some of the painful run sessions I have had, I am just too chicken to try to over-drive the tissue like that. If you do attempt it and it works, be sure to let me know!
I just wondered Kirk. I wont even be attempting to run till the new year as then I'll be around 14 months post op and pretty well healed. You may well be right that fast bursts being too much in the beginning I might have to start out by running a mile or so and get sorted with that before attempting any intervals.
Thanks Danny
I appreciate the update. I'm at about the 3 1/2 month mark and was just thinking this morning that I don't even think about the hip most of the time. I've gotten into my "low stress on the hip routine" as just the way I exercise. I just got back from a 6 mile hike and those hikes create no adverse reactions whatsoever - no stiffness, no pain, no nothing.
While I was doing 70.3 distances pre-op I'm not thinking in those terms anymore. I want to run again, but I'm thinking more of working up to 3 or 4 times per week, at maybe 5 miles a run. The big change for me is that instead of waiting for a full year to start out, I'll likely start at 6 months (my Dr. says I can start now). I will start with exactly what you did, a walk - run, and see how I feel. I'll base progression on a lack of pain - running shouldn't hurt.
The most difficult thing right now is that I feel fine, even though I know I'm not fully healed. I have been sooo tempted to add just a little more weight to the leg press machine, but fortunately my common sense tells me not to. It's just hard to listen sometimes! Damn common sense......
Quote from: KirkM on July 12, 2012, 12:53:47 PM
To be honest, I can't imagine doing any kind of interval training or speed work. That kind of stress would make the tissue completely flip out. When I try to run harder than an easy pace, that is when it goes straight into irritation / inflammation / pain mode.
For what its worth... I'm post op 16 months and only recently started doing hard interval sprint training on the bike (not running). I simply did not have the confidence that my body was ready for it until recently. I realize this is very different than running/sprint training, but I think the important thing is waiting a few months for certain activities may be time well invested in the long term.
Thanks for the info mate. I'm certainly not in the push hard too soon camp. I'm not going to do any high impact till next year and then I'll ease back in.
Thanks Kirk for all the practical advice, makes so much sense.
It is important for everyone to take my experience, and that of anyone else, with a great deal of latitude and interpretation for their unique situation. There are those who take a couple of years to get back to their own "normal" in athletics and then there are aliens like Cory Foulk. It is great to listen to others who have gone before you, but never at the expense of listening to your own body.
The true conservative approach, in my opinion, is Mr. McMinn's. And, after my "moderately" aggressive approach, I understand it completely.
Although I am pretty sure I have not crossed any dangerous lines, I feel what I did was as aggressive as I could get away with. It would certainly have been less frustrating and painful if I had possessed the patience (intelligence?) to take it much slower.
I'm a "test myself" addict. In some situations it is a great trait. It allows you to achieve above and beyond. In other situations, it makes you a blithering moron. It is a narrow fence to walk and often difficult not to fall into the yard of morons. In my own defense, I immediately throttled back every time my body gave me a "knock it off, dumba$$" signal. I wasn't happy about it, but I did back off.
So, be smart, be careful, and most of all, be attentive to the signals you get.
Best to everyone.
Kirk
Really good post Kirk. I'll try to make it to Hawaii despite the ugly photo you posted of the site :o .
Congratulations Kirk, on your race and your comback! I'm at around 8 months, ''running'' 4 to 5 days a week and hoping to resume my multisport carreer next spring at American Zofingan. I would love to meet you for Honu but I'll be keeping my runs to the shorter distances from now on and I don't plan on racing until until I can get my pace down from the 9:30 miles I'm running right now. I can do it and I plan to be at Lavaman in a year or two so maybe we can hip hop along together at that one.
One thing, you're one of the small number of people who can say that they raced with Lance in his short but interesting second triathlon carreer. I listened to the race on the Hilo radio station.
What you all (athletes & not) need to consider with this procedure is much more than the eye sees. There are many muscles being detached and reattached during this operation. When you start to rehabilitate they all don't cooperate in order. It is a slow process for these neurons to come back and learn the process once again. Slow running is one thing, fast running is another. Other muscles take over and compensate for weaker ones when you are trying to do more than is tolerated, thus, weakness, soreness, fatigue, pain and all that comes with that. Injury to a muscle that is overworking to compensate for another and such. Listen to your body is the main key. You are not supposed to be at any one level of recovery at any one time. There are many variables involved, pre-surgery fitness, nutrition, stress, weight, etc. Overall strengthening is a big key. Do other things to strengthen your stabilizing muscles and your hip will be great.
On that note...doing my first sprint tri Sunday and am going to go all out... :P
D.
D -
Too funny...
WH -
Yep, raced with Lance. Even passed him on the bike... Of course, he was on the way back and I was still on the way out, but I can always say I raced with Lance Armstrong and passed him on the bike.
Thanks for the appreciation Kirk...
Kinesiology tape on my calf...
Voltaren on my ass...
Shaved specialties...
Ready to go...
D...
Good luck, Dave. What race are you doing?
Big Bill here.....Can you believe it ???? ::) I forgot that I had yet another ANNIVERSARY......#4 just passed on 7/9/12....time flies when all is well(knock on metal....or wood or something) !!! Still doing well in the gym ,in the pool and all around activity level. Went to a basketball practice with my 9 year old and i can still hoop (at 57)!!! I am very grateful to have my active lifestyle back after resurfacing. A shout out to all my old resurfacing buddies,especially Spencer....hang in there bro and wow us with your journey to recovery!
Big Bill....Cormet Anterior Surface Hippy, Dr. Kreuzer 7/9/08
Big Bill, great to see another Cormet guy doing well. Sounds awesome.
Kirk, thanks for your post. I am back to running. It is almost six months for me. I am doing 6 miles at a easy 8 - 9 min/mile pace. Anything faster really bothers me and I feel it on the run. I completed a sprint and Olympic distance with a slow run. I didnt place but at least I finished. I am doing a walk/run strategy for my IM at 9 months post op. I am giving myself 11 minute miles. If I finish faster I walk the remaining time. I know these strategies usually fall apart but at least I won't try to run the whole thing.
After this IM I think I am going to call it a wrap. Just Sprints and whole bunch of Aquavelos. Although the BHR is made for active lifestyles, I am getting the feeling it is not made for 30-40 miles per week of pounding. When they come out with that device, I will be the first one in line. Keep updating us and thnaks for the motivation and realistic thinking.
I would hate to see you in a race. I might have to flatten your tires.
Hip
Hi HipnHop,
Could you maybe being a bit premature to give up on running as you like? Any running within the first year or two can be limited. Where's the pain, is it more muscle related, or related to the device itself?
CI