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).… Read the rest