Furlough Fun Day

Due to the prudent fiscal planning of my highly paid corporate overlords, I've got to take a full week of furlough this quarter.

Translation: five days of enforced leave without pay.

To make the best of it I've scheduled my furlough days around several weekends like bacon-wrapped shrimp to make up for the fact we have no company-sanctioned holidays over the next three months.

It's a win-win.

Today is the first of those furlough days and I am spending it in full recovery mode after a week of  running and swimming torqued my right hip and shoulder.

 Welcome to my Wellness Day.

It started at 8 a.m. with a trip to my chiropractor, Dr. John Workman, and his massage therapist, Tony Spano. After a 15-minute massage on my shoulder and hip, John worked out the rest of my kinks. I left his office feeling light-headed and pain-free.

It's as if they broke up and released all the toxins I'd been storing in my joints and muscles.

For the rest of the day I think I will just relax, take a walk on the beach, go see a movie (127 Hours is finally playing) and maybe do some yoga later.

Because tomorrow, I'll be running eight miles and hitting the pool.

And now, for all my friends who say they only run if they're being chased, here's N.W.A.:

Life ain't a track meet. It's a marathon.

I thought I'd give everyone a break from all the whining about back aches and hip problems and knee pain until I had something substantial to report.

Now, I do. I'm back to a regular running schedule -- four miles a day, three days a week just to get back into the groove, and I've already dropped my pace by almost two minutes -- from well over 12 minutes to just under 11 minutes. It is a good feeling to move along at a 10:30 pace, even if it's a far way off from the under 9-minute pace I need to set for myself to beat certain people I trash-talked last week.

The biggest news is that for the first time since I began running again, I didn't have that hip socket pounding that had been plaguing me, and my SI joint didn't flare up. That is true progress.

I had laid off running for about a month over the holidays. I was having serious hip pain on both sides, right above the posterior saddle. And the SI joint, blah blah blah. I fought it with anti-inflammatories, ice packs and pain killers and just good old fashioned slackitude. Nothing like lazing around for two weeks watching TV, reading books, eating junk food and guzzling red wine for proper R&R.

But when I got on the scale and saw my weight had climbed over 210, I had to take action. I decided, Fuck this pain, it's just something I'm going to have to live with, laced up my running shoes and hit the road. And it felt like hell, the femur grinding into my hip socket, sending sharp stabbing pain into my SI joint.

Ice and Tramadol followed.

Two days later, I went out again. Ran four miles. Pounded away like a lumbering ox. Ice and pills.

Saturday, I had my first breakthrough. Ran four miles at a 10:35 pace. Ice. Pills.

Sunday. Forty minutes of yoga. No running. No ice. No pills.

Monday. Every muscle in my body ached from the yoga.

Today (Tuesday): Ran four miles. Feeling no pain. Yet.

And now, Ice Cube has a message for ya.

Dry the Rain

I've been bicycling as a substitute for running. Pumping my mountain bike over the Melbourne causeway makes me wish I hadn't sold my road bike, but it's good exercise.

I do 12 miles -- over the causeway to Melbourne Beach and back. It's a good workout because it takes about an hour, doesn't pound the hell out of my SI Joint or aggravate all those bone spurs lined up between the sacrum and ilium like so many coral formations. And that incline is a bitch.

But the traffic is hell, especially with all that construction going on. I have to share the path with walkers and joggers, something I'm not fond of doing, especially when I whiz by at 15 mph and make little old ladies jump when I say, "Bike left!" or "Heads up!"

Days I'm not riding my bike, I'm doing piriformis stretches, yoga, physical therapy floor exercises. And I use a styrofoam roller I got from my chiropractor, Dr. John Workman.

I was doing quite a bit of that with the rain we've had these last two days.

One thing I've noticed: as the pain eases in my SI Joint, it seems to be centering on the hip socket. My massage therapist, Tony, has done a lot of work trying to calm down the tendons and fibers that connect my femur to my hip. It hurts like a mother fucker.

And it makes me wonder how that would feel if I were to take to the trails.

And now, here are The Shins doing a song of one of my faves, the Beta Band -- "Dry the Rain."

Bone-spurs on the saddle

This is depressing. I was doing great. Really enjoying building up my running regimen to about 20 miles a week.

But now I have to put a kybosh on the running, for a couple of months, anyway.

When I went in this morning for my second steroid injection for my SI Joint inflammation, my doctor and I discussed my running, how much of it I was doing, whether it was causing pain. He showed me a whole mess of bone spurs along my sacro-ilial joint. Strenuous exercise, pushing too hard, causes those spurs to jangle.

"Your injury is related to high levels of pounding," he said, preaching moderation in all things. "Although I suspect you and I have very different ideas of what moderation means."

Well, yeah. For more than two years I was training for and running in marathons. I was going through a new pair of training shoes every three months. So the idea of running three to five miles a day, with one nice 8-miler thrown in on the weekends didn't seem unreasonable, and it didn't seem to be hurting.

"The medicine I'm giving you lasts 4-6 weeks," he said, during which time I might not feel the pain that would normally register from my injury. Once the medication wore off, I'd be going around saying, "Like, hey, where did that come from?!"

Point taken: I'm still injured. His goal is to correct the injury, get me back to health and keep me from doing anything that would make that injury permanent. Pain has a way of following pathways, he said. If this had gone on for another year, I'd be owning this pain for the rest of my life.

That's why I'm here, I told the doc. Stop running, he said.

Do things that don't pound the joints. Stretch. Bike. Swim. Walk. Do yoga.

But for the next two months, he said, do not run.

That is going to be very tough indeed. Because these boots were not made for walkin'.

Now, here to ease my pain is "Blood on The Saddle," a classic Tex Ritter song done to death by The Dropdead Beats (with a lead singer channeling Tom Waits):