Saturday I drove out to the Dash Down Greenville 5K, and got there early enough to get a training run in.  I was a little concerned that I had not had a long running day in weeks.  My longest had been a 10 mile run over three weeks ago.  I did an 8 mile run, and then a total of 9.38 miles on this past Saturday (3.11 mi + 6.27mi).  It was at mile 4.5 on that training run when my hip started to feel REALLY tight.  I stopped and stretched on that run, and then did some more hip stretching before the gun went off for the 5K.

It was probably at mile 2 of the 5K, when I started to really hurt. I took short walking breaks to give my hip some rest, and finished the race at 35:28.00, which is three minutes slower than my average 5k race time.

I walked around the finisher’s area, grabbing beers, and race paraphernalia. As I started to walk back to my Jeep, my hip got worse; I could hardly walk.  I gimped across to the parking lot, and found that the area I parked in was Party Central for the parade.  If any of you are familiar with the Greenville Avenue St Patrick’s Day Parade, you will know or should know that the CVS parking lot at Lovers & Greenville is a melee of tents, parties, cookouts, kegs, freaks, and booze-a-plenty.  If you did not have a drink in hand or a jello shot in your face, someone was giving one to you.

No matter how much beer I drank, the pain was keeping me pretty sober.  I really just wanted to get out of there and go home, but my jeep was blocked in by the HUGE crowd of party goers.

Thankfully Christie was going to be just a train stop south of the parade, so I hopped on a DART train and met her at Whole Foods.  I had the hardest time walking.  I had to walk a block to get from the train station to the store, and I thought that at one point I was gonna start crying. I sucked it up, and just kept telling myself that I was almost there. Once I arrived I grabbed a couple more beers, and some food.

The next day it felt a little better, but the “better” never really progressed the following day. Tuesday I made an appointment with a Chiropractor, and will be  going in every day until race day.

The doctor has a massage therapist on staff, so she tries to work out the kinks for a half an hour, and then he tries to adjust my hip.  At one point he had his elbow dug into my glute muscle, with his entire 185 pounds of body weight pushing into that trigger point.  I had to just deep breath in order to take it.  I did not care what had to be done, I just wanted this pain gone.  I have the Dallas Rock ‘n’ Roll half Marathon on Sunday, so this needs to be remedied QUICK!