Hamstring, 4 weeks later

Here I am, sitting on the couch watching TV, probably resembling Peggy Bundy with her Bon Bons, but I’m actually an athlete in training. You can tell the difference because if you look really close, you’ll see an ice pack under my leg. I could have said in my pants, and while that was true, this is a PG blog.

So I finally went to see a doctor after four weeks, and the result was the ultimate in boring. Yes, I did give my hamstring a good injury, but there’s nothing else wrong and it’s simply going to take quite a bit of time to get back to where I once was, and probably I won’t be as fast as I once was. Sort of like your mechanic saying your Yugo will be a bit slower.

For various reasons, I’m not going to be doing any formal therapy right now. But recovery from a hamstring injury is actually quite boring. Like, avoid doing things that cause pain and re-injury (duh?). But seriously, it’s a three step process: Get the pain and swelling under control, then work on restoring range of motion, then exercise the muscle to get strength back.

So right now I’m at the stretching stage, and also cheating a little bit by doing some running. Running is a bit of an exaggeration, it’s more like walking with occasional periods of jogging, slowly. But I had been planning for months to enter a 5K a week from now, and if I can crawl it I’ll probably enter it.

Stay tuned, this is going to be an interesting week.