Week -40: Needles

Last week was a bit of a breaking point for me.  My bike ride last Friday was cut short due to knee pain - this is the first time that any knee problems have transferred into bike riding.  Bike riding being my favourite sport of the three by far, and my favourite non-competitive activity as well, this is completely unacceptable.  Then we went out ski touring last weekend, and again the knee flared up....again, never an issue before, and now my second favourite activity was out.

One of the options to treat IT band syndrome is called IMS - basically acupuncture, but instead of targeting acupuncture points, they just jam needles into the offending muscles.  The theory being that the muscles don't like that, and tense up to stop it happening - they then get so tense that they have to relax, which should relieve the IT band tenseness issue.

To me, this sounded like a load of hocus.

But desperate times... so I booked an appointment with a physiotherapist, and he jammed needles all through both IT bands.  The muscles definitely tensed up.  I was so sore afterwards that if I had had a bungee cord, I would have let Caroline pull me home on my bike.

Two days later, I ran 1.5 km.  Which is triple what I was able to do the week before, and I only stopped because I didn't want to push it.  So maybe not so much hocus.  We'll have to see how things progress in the next few weeks.

(T-40 weeks and counting until New Zealand)

	Matt	Caroline
Swim
Sessions	1	0
Distance (m)	1000	0
Bike
Distance (km)	71	75
Elevation (m)	133	0
Run
Sessions	1	1
Distance (km)	1.5	9
Backcountry
Distance (km)	0	0
Elevation (m)	0	0