Today is eight months since I tore my hamstring and have been unable to do one thing I totally love, run on trails.   After months of A.R.T. treatment I got rid of the continuous pain and was able to sit a bit longer and walk a bit better but still there was no way I could run.  Doing research I came to the realization that this was going to take much longer to heal than a few months.   I continued treatments through the summer and took on a strengthening regime to try and get the hamstring back.   I started doing some flat hiking and a lot of biking through the summer. I even retrofitted my recumbent with fatter tires so I could ride on trails and be in the woods instead of just on paved trails and the roads.

By early fall it seemed that I had pretty much stalled in healing, things were not really getting any better at all.  I looked into PRP treatment and had decided to set an appointment if things hadn’t improved by the time we got back from our family vacation in September.   On our trip to Mazama I did some more real hiking and actually started feeling better.   By mid-September we were thru-hiking Rattlesnake Mountain which is a pretty decent climb compared to what I’d been doing all summer and the leg was holding up.   There was even a period in there where I went pain free for about a week and then the pain crept back in and I felt like I’d relapsed.

Catherine found a great article on Healing Hamstring Injuries by yoga instructor Doug Keller and I began doing his routine with locust and bridge pose along with continuing the slant-board and stability disc workout from Eric Orton’s The Cool Impossible.  Over the last month I feel that I’ve gotten back some strength though the hamstring still gives me pain on a daily basis at some level, just not all day.  The last few weeks I’ve incorporated an OpenStride machine at the gym along with biking and have slowly ramped from .25 miles up to 1.25 miles this morning.  It feels good to at least be doing a motion similar to running even if it is on a machine in the gym instead of out on the trails. My hope is that I can continue building up miles on the machine while keeping up and increasing the strength work and add in some hiking and snowshoeing over the winter.

I’m a bit afraid to even try running until I can stay 100% pain free for a month and at this point haven’t made it pain free for more than a day.  It seems that it just doesn’t take much overdoing to send me backwards by months and I would rather be able to hike and not run than attempt running and wreck my ability to hike.   So far I’ve been able to stay pretty connected with the trail running community by still doing setup/registration for Northwest Trail Runs and doing a lot of photography for both them and Evergreen Trail Runs.   I still really hope that I’ll be running again early next season and have been eyeing the event calendar from Northwest, Evergreen and Rainshadow Running.