The First Setback of the Season

Following last week's epic Drumlin Wachusett summit loop, I took the weekend off to attend my own 9 month belated wedding reception and in so doing stood around a lot. Too much as it turned out because between the reception itself (a daytime luncheon) and the evening after-party, I managed to aggravate my hips and lower back. My whole pelvis area ached at the time but I didn't give it much thought.

Fast forward two days to Monday and I noticed a slow, nagging pain just below my left knee cap. I ignored it. On Tuesday afternoon, a beautiful day, my knee still ached but I figured I'd ride through it. Wrong. I got on the bike, tried to peddle and instantly realized it wasn't going to work. Too much power and energy have to surge through the area that was becoming more painful.

By Tuesday night, I couldn't bend my left leg. The slightest movement caused searing pain to shoot across my knee cap. And just like that, I'm injured.

Eschewing the usual round of primary care doctors, clinics, specialists, orthopedic oncologists, MRI and XRay technicians, I went right to the man that holds the power of Healing in his youthful yet powerful hands: Master Yang, the medical Qi Gong specialist.

"Is not your knee, is here!" he said and pointed to his own lower back. Then he went to work on me. Half way through the session, I was crying. Not exactly from pain but from the intimacy of his touch and the sense of caring and wisdom that came through his Herculean fingers. He dug into my thigh, my pelvis, my sciatica, my hips. By the end of the first session, he had my left leg bending fully, though only with his assistance.

I had a second session with Master Yang Friday, June 27th. Fewer tears but deep probing. He dug his steely elbows into my butt cheeks, he probed bands of tendon and muscle along the hip and outer leg, he manipulated my right leg, pumping it like a water pump and pressing on various pinpoint areas of pain within my pelvis. By the end of that session, I was able to do knee bends without pain.

But I am not through this. Far from it. Today, my beloved ND and I are off on five days vacation travel so I'll be folding myself into airplane seats, shuffling through airport terminals, trying to walk as normally as possible but failing because I can't push off on my left leg still; I have to walk stiff-legged and ascend stairs one leg up at a time. I am visibly hobbled.

So for the foreseeable future, I am off the bike. The very next time I can have a session with Master Yang is July 9th. In the meantime, I'll be stepping carefully, wincing, hoping for the best.  The thing is, when something goes wrong like this, when a body part doesn't work, you think it will never work again. How will the pain ever go away? Ah, but it will. That's the wonder of the human body, the ability to recuperate. I just have to keep believing.

Post script: Really bad timing on the injury too because the 2014 edition of the Longsjo Classic is going on this weekend in both Lemonstar and my future home, Wormtown. I saw just a little of the downtown criterium last night and wished I could have been pedaling around the periphery of the scene in my own bike gear checking it all out. Cha.