A Passion for Running

I’ve got two things to share today and I need your help (please look for my question at the end of this post)…

First, I’m happy to report that my piriformis pain (i.e the pain in my a$$) is 99% gone and I’m fascinated by what accelerated the healing – being on the bike. Both Aaron and my massage therapist had suggested rolling on a tennis ball to do some self-inflicted deep-tissue massage but I wasn’t having a great deal of luck with it – and that was over a span of a couple of months.

But then I started riding my bike to work and, within only a few rides, began to notice improvement. Seems that the repetitive moving of my butt on the bike seat provided massage precisely in the area I needed. Neat huh?

That’s quite enough about my butt – let’s move on to my whiplash shall we?

The whiplash was very difficult to get though – one month’s worth of pretty terrible pain and there was no miracle cure there. However, I did learn something very valuable during the healing.

Some of you may remember this post – a very bleak piece of writing that eventually (very eventually) ended up with a positive message.

It looks like I’m closing another loop around that time of my life.

While healing from my whiplash, I was reminded of a similar experience I had in April 2004. What I wrote here was that I had “woken up” with pain in my neck, arm and shoulders. Woken up is not quite accurate (I’m not sure why I didn’t write the details). What actually happened was that I had woken up with a very violent jolt and essentially given myself whiplash.

Subsequent posts remind me that I had referred pain down my arms just like I had with this latest bout of whiplash.

But, more importantly, the pattern I’ve now noticed is that the neck and shoulder pain I had that lasted two + years began with that first instance of whiplash. The injury – lingered.

So, now I have a clear understanding but the bonus stuff is that it seems as though the way my whiplash is healing this time is actually helping the lingering effects of the first bout of whiplash – I have less tension in my neck and shoulders than I did prior to this last instance of whiplash.

It’s clear I need to take steps toward avoiding future episodes of whiplash. Perhaps strengthening the muscles in my neck and shoulders will help. Do you have any thoughts on that?