For anyone that has had anything to do with
my sporting endeavours over the last 25 years or so would be well accustomed to
the high rate of failure that I’ve had in the hamstring department. Over the last couple of years I seemed to
have reached something of a compromise with the troublesome muscles where they
might have niggled a little here and there, but in the main they’ve held up to
what they’ve needed to without me missing too much, particularly in the way of
soccer.
Retiring from touch football and
recognizing that I was just too competitive not to try and chase down someone
that I should certainly seemed to help with not getting up to a full sprint and
losing a decent amount of weight helped too.
This year I’ve kept up the running despite
the seemingly endless travel for work and managed to play most of the soccer
season without incident. I only missed one game during the season (at least
until recently) which gave me time to recover and then I played consistently
again until there were about 5-6 weeks to go.
Something started nagging me through the
back of the knee. It wasn’t enough to
stop me at first and certainly didn’t feel like any hamstring problem that I’d
had before, so I played on. A couple of weeks ago it was bad enough that I
didn’t finish a game (and trust me, there’s nothing I hate more than not
finishing a game) but by the end of the night it was feeling substantially
better than I’d hoped. I probably shouldn’t have played and taken the week off
instead, but I was trying to do the right thing and help out given how short we
were for players at the time. I managed to run a half marathon the following
day at a reasonable time given I thought I was likely to pull out after about
2kms.
The week after that I again didn’t finish a
soccer game, this time because of a slight problem with the other hamstring. I really didn’t expect
to be playing the week after that effort. At least at that point we’d stitched
up the league win!
Fast forward to the Friday though and Emily
asked me to go and play tennis with her around at the local courts. I was
feeling better than I’d expected to but let her know that I might not be as
active as she’d like. As it turned out things went a hell of a lot better than
I’d thought they would. By the end of the time that we spent there I was
running down the ball, jumping and move more freely than I had in weeks. I
decided that I’d be able to play the following day after all.
On the day of the game I was bouncing
around with what seemed like a new-found lease on life, enjoying the warm up
rather than tentatively working my way through it and eager for the game to
begin.
I lasted about 5 minutes. The first time I
went near the ball I had no problems, laying a lovely long ball over the top
for the winger to run onto. Not long after that though, I tried to clear one
across my body and something didn’t feel right at all. My leg was what I can
only describe as ‘wobbly’. The weird thing was though that I could still run
and it wasn’t an intense pain like I associated with a hamstring failure. I
kept playing.
Moments later I stretched for a ball going
past me and it caught the end of foot, twisting it laterally away from me. Good
lord did that hurt. There was definitely no playing on from that one. I came off and started with the ice.
That was two weeks ago. In the mean time
I’ve tried not to do too much, only going for a couple of very light runs to
test the limits a bit. It hasn’t felt like past tears and I’ve managed to run
up to 5kms, though there’s been that constant threat that something could go
wrong at any moment. It nagged me enough and was different enough that I
decided that I needed to get someone to have a look at it and let me know what
was going on. After all, this weekend is the city-bay run and I didn’t want to
embark on a 12km run if there was something potentially structural wrong.
I managed to have it scanned today. I
honestly expected them to come back and tell me that it was just soft tissue,
that I’d be fine and I was worried about nothing. Instead they let me know that
I’d pulled it off the bone.WTF?
Yep one of the three connections has pulled
off the bone and retracted about 11cms. I guess ice and rest isn’t going to fix
that little beauty.
I don’t know what my path forward is from
here. The doctor said that the options are to basically carry on and just have
the two bits that remain compensate (along with some scar tissue that will
develop) or to have expensive surgery and a long recovery (like potentially 5
months).
I’m torn. Literally and figuratively. I
need some more expert advice before I make a decision. And that is where I am
at; a whole lot frustrated, a little bit
depressed and somewhat broken.
If it does turn out to be my last soccer
game at least we won the league!
