One year update

[KirkM]

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!

[Boomer]

Kirk - That is an outstanding update. Congrats to you for getting your life back. Thanks for posting.

Boomer

[hernanu]

Kirk, that is great! congratulations and keep it up.

[Kiwi]

Hey Kirk - Awesome to read. Keep it up.... and keep us posted!
Cherz
Kiwi

[obxpelican]

Now where is that like button?


Chuck

[Dannywayoflife]

Awesome Kirk! Well done mate!

[David]

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.

[sroberts]

Awesome job Kirk! Keep up the good work!!



spencer

[KirkM]

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$$!

[Tin Soldier]

Nice job.  That's excellent. 

[ScubaDuck]

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

[Pat Walter]

Good Luck Kirk

Great to hear from you.  Wishing you many more years with your hip resurfacing.

Pat

[KirkM]

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!

[hernanu]

Now THAT sounds fine. I'll be in the foo foo line  ;D

[KirkM]

This is the event site.  Just an enticement in case anybody is interested in picking out a tree ahead of time.   ;D

[bilateralbliss]

Great news to hear Kirk!

[stephen1254]

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.

[KirkM]

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.   ;)

[Dannywayoflife]

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!

[KirkM]

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!