It's been a couple weeks since my last post. Thats because I've spent the better part of two weeks on my back and unable to do any exercise thanks to a sprained ligament or tendon in my lower back as a result from the bike ride the other week.
I have no idea what I did or how it happened, but there are a few thoughts - none of which hold a whole lot of water. More on that later, though.
First - in retrospect, there were signs something was wrong right away. When I got off the bike, my lower back was very tight. At the time, I assumed it was just normal soreness from having been hunched over for a few hours. Over the next few hours, the tightness increased, and it started becoming a little bit more painful.
By the next day, if it was general soreness, things should have gotten better. They didn't. The following evening it was starting to become actively painful. Sitting in my car, and going from a sitting to standing position was getting extremely uncomfortable. I thought that I must have tweaked my back in a way that I've done a couple times in the past, where applying heat helped, but in general didn't really debilitate me all that much. In those instances, within a short time I would literally feel something in my lower back snap back into place, and all was well. Oddly enough, that following evening when it was actively painful, we went to see a movie, and I made a conscious effort to keep my back nice and straight. The ride home was completely comfortable, and I went to bed pain free. I thought I was passed the worst of it.
Sunday morning I awoke to a stiff lower back again, and one that was constantly painful. I took a couple advil, but that didn't seem to help. I also noticed that my hip was way out of line - I'd stand straight and it looked like I was kicking my hip out to the left. This resulted in my right leg being noticably shorter - about 3/4" - than my left. Throughout that day, I found sitting to be more and more painful, and had a few instances where I would try to stand up, and literally couldn't because the pain was so intense during that transition.
Monday (Memorial day) came, and I had to head out to Ohio for work. I'm not sure how I did it, but I somehow managed to deal with luggage, driving to the airport, going through security, waiting for the plane (it was delayed), sitting in the plane, and then getting to the hotel in Baltimore where I was stuck for the night thanks to missing a connection. Monday night began the most painful 24 hours of my life. Between not sleeping well that night, not being able to get comfortable at all, having to wake up early the next day to catch a flight to Ohio, going through the airport and sitting in an airplane again (which not only have uncomfortable seats for the lower back, but you're also very constrained and cannot move around much to get more comfortable), having to drive 2 hours to the customer site (remember, sitting was painful for me at this point), and then having to put in a full day of work - I was in real rough shape Tuesday night. I ended up calling my doctor Tuesday afternoon to try and make an appointment - something was wrong and I needed to find out why. He told me to take 800 mg of ibuprofin for 5 days, and see if the issue just goes away.
That Tuesday evening, I started taking the ibuprofin. A few hours later, I finally got some relief from the pain. It was at this point that I found that lying down was relatively pain free - basically, if I kept pressure off my back, I was in much better shape.
So the next couple days I stayed loaded up on Advil, and things were somewhat better. Still painful, but I returned home on Wednesday and was able to work from home Thursday and Friday while lying on the couch. Improvement was very slow, almost imperceptable.
As luck would have it, I needed to travel for work on the following Monday and Tuesdaay as well. By Sunday evening, after having spent a good 4 days on my back, I was feeling quite a bit better, and had learned how to compensate for most daily activities (putting on socks, tying shoes, drying off after the shower, etc) without stressing the painful area of my back. So while I was still not anywhere close to all better, I was managing.
Monday night to Tuesday was a real turning point. The amount that I would fidget when sitting down, and the amount of pain I would be in when standing went down noticably between those two days. I still ended up making an appointment with my doctor for later in the week - because improvement had still been very slow that I was concerned about something more than soft tissue damage.
Each day since Tuesday had seen major improvements (funnily enough, one of the best indicators was the increased ease at which I was able to put my socks on in the morning), with Wednesday being the first day I felt definitively better than 50%.
On Thursday I went to the doctor, and the verdict was a sprained ligament. As things have healed, I've been able to identify where I think the injury is - just to the right of the lower back, where the back muscle attaches to the hip. At this point, that is the only place where soreness exists. I think what happened was that the tissue got damaged on the right hand side, and the left hand side of the back tensed up (which I could feel) to provide support that the right hand side couldn't (a form of a defense mechanism against causing further damage). Due to the constant tension, my hip got pulled way out of whack, which explains why it looked like it was kicked out. Then, the inflammation around the injury was putting pressure on and pinching nerves, which did their part to scream 'OW!' and also possibly cause other secondary muscle spasms.
So - at this point, I'd say I'm 90% of the way back to normal. I still find that my hip is out of alignment if I've been sitting for a while (it really depends on the seat/chair), and there is some general soreness near the area of the injury. But after 2 weeks - I'm just damn glad I can move around for most daily activities.
As far as what caused this whole mess - as I said before, I'm not entirely sure. It wasn't a longer or more intense ride then any other I've done this year. So it's not really an obvious case of doing too much too soon. There was this one incident on the way back where I almost fell, but I managed to get my foot out of the pedal and get my hand down to keep me from completely spilling over. It's possible that reflex action in that case made the muscles tense up so much that they actually caused damage. Another possibility is that I took a 45 minute break - perhaps that was enough for my already normally tight hamstrings to get just a little too tight, pull more on my pelvis then normal, and during the ride back there was simply a lot of tension between my pelvis and my back muscle. The third possibility - just a freak thing. I mean, even pro athletes who do the same moves 10,000 times end up once in a while having a freak accident.
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