I’m recovering from a round of activity-related injuries. It’s not been pleasant. The most recent issue is sciatic nerve pain in my right leg. It came on slowly, then got insane, and then started lifting almost as mysteriously as it arrived. It is only the second time I’ve had this issue. It may be piriformis-related, but it’s hard to tell. At the peak of the pain, I was taking six ibuprofen per day, spaced in three hour intervals. Switching positions was the worst, like when I got in the car to drive somewhere and had to endure insanity-inducing levels of burning agony for the first ten minutes, while trying to manage traffic.
Then it would lift and subside. My back muscles would unknot, and I would revel in a few tens of minutes of low levels of pain. Until I had to stand again. Sleeping was fitful and I would sometimes wake and need to sit in an office chair and elevate my legs until an ibuprofen kicked in.
The lead up to this round of pain was a steady diet of four miles of daily running in the dim of the summer dawn, rising at 4:45AM to get on the trail by 5:15. My companions in Sedona were a few coyotes, an occasional startled doe, the moon, and the red rocks. There were occasionally dirtbaggers sleeping in their cars by the trailheads, but rarely tourists at those hours, which made pandemic running calm and focused.
I was then on an ever-rising daily diet of strength building broken up into three groups with two rounds each, so six sets. I started feeling pain with crunches initially (hence the piriformis self-diagnosis), so cut those out and replaced them with three types of planks (regular, side, leg lift). The rest were 20-40lb free weight curls, squats, rows, overhead lift, pushups, etc. I could get through a set in about 20 minutes.
And then it all came crashing down as the pain amplified and even basic movements were discouraged by the horror show.
The previous year I worked my way through blacktoe (my second time, lovely, but mine are painless and just involve losing the nail), prepatellar bursitis, and two bonking experiences, with the first one while running rim-to-river-to-rim in the Grand Canyon. If you are unfamiliar with bonking, the theory is that one uses up all of one’s carbohydrates in the bloodstream. After that, your body is kind enough to release glycogen from the liver as a kind of reserve energy source for your muscles. And once that is gone, things get weird. For me, it manifests as cold sweats, utter fatigue (obviously), a bit of vomiting, and general discomfort. Others hallucinate or become demented. I might, too, but the main symptoms keep me from pushing on to the point I might experience such unpleasantness.
In Grand Canyon, I made it to the river in a little over two hours on Bright Angel, and then ran out of gas coming back up at Indian Gardens. So I lay down on a bench at their little theater area under a tree. I hydrated. I slurped a puree of mangoes and sweet potatoes. I hydrated more. And then I just walked up and out, slowly and unpleasantly, humbled by children passing on the highest parts of the trail.
Since that was my first bonk ever, I look back on it as a learning moment. The key, I think, is doing a better job carb loading before the run. I had a gel shot or two with me but used them too late in the game, I think. I was planning to test these theories this summer, but then the sciatica hit.
I was asked a bit back whether the discomfort was worth the outcome. I asked a French couple the same thing on top of a mountain in New Zealand a few years back. The woman translated my English for her partner. They both looked at me and we all just started laughing, then quieted down and watched the clouds roll across the volcano.
The pain is almost gone. It’s nearly time to get out there again.