three things thursday

1. The first thing has got to be ow.  Lots of strange things have been happening to my legs since my appointment last week - first it seemed like it was healing, then I had a perfectly good long run, then some weird calf pain came back, then my knee felt like it was 8 times bigger than it should be, more collapsing leg, all kinds of fun stuff.  I plunked that hot mess on the desk of the fabulous Dr. Paul, and from that he deduced that my posterior chain is just real pissed.  (Note: any medical information told to me goes through the cheese grater of my ability to remember so it's possible that this is all wrong.)  My solaris muscle (one of the hamstrings, apparently there are many) was really tight and pulling on my knee from the top, and my calf was a giant mess of inflammation-turned-clumpy-scarlike-tissue that was actually glueing my two calf muscles together and yanking on my knee from the back.  So that's the recipe for collapsing leg, in case you are trying to make it at home.  


Anyhow, out came the giant metal toothbrush.  The solaris gave in pretty easily, but I think that the re-separating of my calf muscles might nudge out the shins for the most painful Graston session yet.  It essentially felt like someone used a knife to slice open my skin, poured salt and gasoline in the wound, set it on fire, and then rubbed it up and down for about 10 minutes with a handsaw.  This is the first time I've actually tried to use my safe word ("stop") in a session.  When he was done, my magical collapsing leg had fled, though, so I'll take it.  I generally don't bruise from these sessions but I'm sporting a sick black-and-blue from this one.  He recommended an Epsom salt bath (I did it although I have no idea what it is supposed to do), lots of ice and stretching and I go back in tomorrow for another round.  I'll try to keep the blood-curdling shrieks to a minimum this time.


2. I decided to balance my desire to lay in bed eating spinach and blueberries and grapefruit all week with a night out with some of my favorite girls.  Despite the fact that several of them have blogs of their own, I somehow managed to escape without a single picture being taken of my food, our table, or the group shot where we are all leaning over weirdly and have the flash reflecting off of our foreheads.  I had a blast and was able to sneak in some good-for-recovery foods (limes, tomatoes, beans) and did not even one time have to hold up my fingers to show how miles I ran that morning.  I continued to behave like a responsible athlete by climbing directly into the Epsom salt bath when I got home, showing admirable restraint by only eating one two most a few of the chocolates from the 70%-off day-after box that the poet picked up after my frantic pre-dinner phone call from the sold-out CVS in Dupont Circle.  


3. The bike refit I did a few weeks ago is almost perfectly good.  My shoulder pain is staying away, but something was done to my saddle that means the seam of my bike shorts is now perfectly aligned between my sit bones and the edge of the saddle.  I've never had saddle problems before - only one instance of having a sore lanced and that was from wearing old chamois-fraying shorts - and I'm not interested in starting now, so I might be tootling back to the shop today or tomorrow to get things adjusted yet again.  But I'm wondering, lady friends, if it's not so much the position of the saddle but the shape.  I've tried multiple pairs of shorts and the chamois seam seems to ride constantly in the same place, which makes me think that maybe the back of my saddle is either slightly too wide or slightly too narrow.  Before I was refit, I was constantly sliding back on my saddle, which I was told was because it was too far forward.  Now that the saddle is in the correct place, I'm wondering if maybe it's not right for me.  I really don't want to set fire to any more cash in the name of triathlon, and I'm more inclined to pursue the fit route before I pursue the expensive new-saddle route, but if you've had similar sit-bones/seam/saddle issues, I'd love to hear about it.  My current saddle is whatever came on the QR - some kind of Adamo.


Happy Thursday friends!  Let's talk us some crotch.