I guess my first half marathon at wineglass is a lost cause at this point. It has been more than three weeks since I royally screwed up. Since that time, I have been stunned to learn that many runners really don’t do much stretching at all! Woah!
I’m sure there are many of you experienced runners that are chuckling to yourself, knowing full well that fully stretching a muscle and tendon takes away its “tight spring” effectiveness. Again, holy moly.
Here’s what I probably did to screw up my left adductor, probably right where it connects to the femur (or knee?)
Overtraining abdominals, hip flexors and adductors (probably iliopsoas as well) with hanging leg and knee lifts immediately followed by lying leg raises a la Stanford University’s legendary abs program which I’ve been doing for years, but just never in conjunction with distance running.
Then, the next day, I would do multiple sets of box jumping plyometrics, and then repeated broad jumps. This was before typical leg day exercises.
But the real killer, I guess, was doing extensive stretching after each run, I think what really got me was wide-split-martial-arts-style hamstring and adductor stretching
Dumb dumb dumb… OK so I’ve learned my lesson. So my question to all of you out there is how do I rehab this left adductor?
Thanks in advance for all of your experience and expertise in this area.
I highly recommend getting in to see Gerrit Van Loon at Natural Health Family Chiropractic. He does active release technique which is incredible for soft tissue injuries. He’s also very helpful in thinking about rehab and other factors contributing to injury. I attribute Dr Gerrit with my ability to train mostly injury free.
Good luck! Adductors are tough to rehab. In addition to Liz’s recommendation, I’d suggest that you want to take it easy, but not to the point of complete rest. The body needs some loading to trigger healing, so I’d encourage hiking or even very slow jogging as long as it doesn’t change your stride (a recipe for more injuries) and as long as you don’t have more pain 24 hours later.
One suggestion I have is to go to acupuncture - I recently injured my hip and I hit it with acupuncture and PT and it was better quickly (I first ruled out a stress fracture with an X-ray after failing a hop test).
Yeah, stationary bike seems to not bother it at all, but every time I go to the cornell track… About 1 mile in with any type of stride at all it rears its ugly head.
Going to stick with stationary bike and walking for two or three weeks…
Wineglass can wait another year.
Thank you everybody!
Looking forward to finally running with the group when I get up to speed