Maybe it's redundant

Feel free to skim and/or skip this -- it's my update after my first PT session...

This is really long 'cause I copied and pasted it from an email. Not 'cause I'm always long and rambly. Oh, wait.

PT was good, I guess, I don't know. It was a big evaluation, she had me stand this way and that, and twist and lift legs and push against resistance and stuff like that. I told her about the gait analysis, the hip pain last year, the doc, the new shoes ... She said my hips are definitely not level right now, that they're tiled / rotated ....

In the end she said:
1.) I DO have a small leg length discrepancy (she measured, hip/pelvic bone to ankle, on each side) - just under .5" -- not enough to be noticeable walking, etc, but possibly enough to cause problems in running
2.) pregnancy loosens ligaments (I knew that) and it takes a year or two to recover. Successive pregnancies can make things more out of wonk. After hearing that I have 7 children and the youngest is 17 months she said that my ligaments are probably "shot" and that I'll need to do muscle strengthening to help the muscles support what the ligaments are not doing.

She gave me a lift for my left shoe and encouraged me to wear it as much as possible unless it makes things worse (which might happen because my body compensated long ago for the discrepancy) ...

She said we'll give it a day or two with the lift, and then talk about running but we don't want to try too many new things at once. She said if I'm improved by Wednesday I'll try to run a little (1 mile (or less if it hurts)) and then see how I feel in the 2 hour window afterward. If I'm lurching / hurting worse then I run only half as far the next time. If I'm okay, then I can incrementally creep up the distance. Too early to know if I can run in the Dow run, she said it's probably cutting it close but who knows, I might see a huge improvement with the lift.

I have to go 3x/week for 4 weeks (which takes me right up until the race) ...

Soooo. I don't know, I guess that's good that 1.) she thought there were two clear problems and 2.) she thinks the lift and strengthening / stretching / exercises will help. But I guess I'm frustrated that we still don't really KNOW if it'll help. I came home thinking I should've just quit and given up before starting down this road, but that's kind of silly.

She said I could bring in my shoes and the class gait analysis / shoe recommendation sheet and she'll try to see if my new shoes fit the bill, and she said we could talk to the PT who did the analysis, and she wrote on her list to do another one.

So now I'm a dork with a special thing in my shoe ....

She didn't really confirm or say it wasn't what Dr. B said (tight adductor muscles), so ... :shrug

She does think that strengthening my core / doing Pilates might help in the long run. Although she said not to jump in and take a class and do all the hard moves right away, that I'd need to ease into it. And that she'd incorporate some pilates into the exercises we do.

And she said that even though running can be hard on the joints, the other health benefits outweigh the damage running does, and that it's worth pursuing continuing to run.

Maybe I should learn the Chi Running technique (forgot to ask her about that, if she knew of it, whether I could try to learn it while recovering) so that I do less joint damage in the long run. The chi running is supposed to put your body into alignment and work with gravity to run fluidly and easy on the joints -- to prevent injury.

I've been meaning to ask the Chi Running guy about learning while recovering.

One of the leaders at the Race Prep class said she took the Chi Running course last year and it's taken her a year to really *get it* physically -- it's apparently easy to *understand* but not so easy to retrain your body in how it moves.

Huh.

So.

Anyway.