Pain

I just finished rolling out my ass again. I'm obsessed with rolling my calves and feet and hamstrings and glutes and quads... My new philosophy... If you can roll it out, why wouldn't you? 

I guess in the past I have opted to skip all this rolling because, well, it hurts. I was just on my living room floor with a tennis ball under my ass and I had this horrible grimace on my face and Scott was like WHAT are you doing?? And I know it sounds crazy but there's this weird part of me that is totally embracing the pain I feel when I find yet another tight spot somewhere. There are some spots in my upper hamstring(s) that make me go YIKES. At this point I am 100% convinced that the hamstring/glute/hip spots are directly related to the calf pain. Pretty much the only time my calf feels perfect is when my hamstring feels good and loose.

Yesterday I had another ART appt. My ART guy is getting to know me better and has apparently decided that he needs to be (and can be) more aggressive in getting after my tight spots. Clearly I am willing to put up with whatever pain necessary so I can go out and put myself through more pain... the ithurtssogood good pain of swimbikerun... So Erik got out that graston tool thing at the end of my appt. Here's a little video of one doctor using a graston tool on an achilles tendon. Doesn't look that bad, huh? Yesterday Erik had me loading my soleus by standing on just the one leg and going through the running motion while he used that tool and dug right into my fascia... It was searingly painful. He said he could hear the tissue cracking though so I guess there was some scar tissue in there that maybe has now been broken up and is healing? He warned me that for sure I would be bruised but then he put more Kinesio tape on it (blue this time- Moana put in a request for purple next time) so I can't see the bruises. I asked him if I could run today and he said if I felt like it I could.

And I felt like it! So I did. It's definitely not perfect but it's better and didn't give me any problems while I was running so that was awesome. I did feel pain while I was biking and running today... but it was the good kind of pain... the kind of pain you feel through your whole body when you're reaching and digging and trying to make your garmin display the numbers you want to see... I was happy with the numbers I saw today. :) 6 weeks til Honu!