Inner strength

It was back to the physio this afternoon to try to identify what exactly is causing my lower back pain and then developing strategies to avoid another muscle spasm.

My back hasn’t been too bad lately but even so, several hours after a long run and the following day, my back is especially fragile and I worry that this might trigger another muscle spasm. And the problem is once I feel the start of a muscle spasm there is nothing I can do to stop it, which ultimately leads to another week off from running.

So what to do? I need to develop some inner strength. It seems I need to strengthen my stabiliser muscles and reactivate and retrain particular stabilisers that have lost tone and some function, probably as a result of past injuries especially the most recent being the torn hamstring. To strengthen these stabilisers I was shown a selection of exercises that I need to do, some of them requiring a swiss ball. No surprises to learn that my balance is shonky, as I wobbled around on the swiss ball trying to attempt the simplest of exercises. I have some work to do.

Another 13km run done this morning, mostly under the cover of darkness. It won’t be long before my early morning runs are done completely in the pre-dawn darkness.

“Wrinkles should merely indicate where the smiles have been.” – Mark Twain