A Brief History of Mike's Right Leg

Why is it always my right leg?  Can we just get lefty in on the action for once?

I played 3 sports for 4 years in high school - football, wrestling and throwing shot/discus on the track team.  Do you know how many injuries I had?  One.  One sprained ankle during 2-a-days as a freshman.  It didn't even keep my out of the next days practices.  That seems like a pretty good record overall.  Actually, if you count the concussions, it would be more than one...what was I talking about...oh yeah, my right leg.  You will have to forgive me, every now and then things get a little discombobulated.

My first real injury came playing paintball of all things.  To be brief, I ducked down onto one knee to avoid being hit and rammed my knee into a tree root.  There was immediate pain and a complete inability to extend my knee.  Things improved and I was back to normal...almost.  Running in a straight line gave me no issues at all.  Pivoting or quickly changing directions was a different story.  One of these maneuvers was quickly followed by pain, locking up of the knee, and swearing (I try to avoid the swearing now, just so ya know).  It got to the point that I had the knee scoped and the surgeon removed the piece of torn medial meniscus.

Following this, I was doing great.  One hundred percent back to normal.

And then I herniated a disc in my low back.  Crap.

This healed up without the need for surgery or shots but it did lead to one major long-term problem...weakness, specifically in the right calf and hamstring.  Not the kind of weakness you can see.  I look perfectly normal, but when I physically push myself, there is a difference.  I can feel a difference.

The torn meniscus and the faint weakness are not a good combination.  Why?  Well I'm glad you asked.

The only reason I stopped running was because of my right knee.  After my scope, I was fine.  As I got more into running following the low back injury, I found that I had poor impact control on my right leg.  I could feel it.  As I came down on my left foot, I could feel myself absorb the impact and spring forward.  As I came down on my right foot, it felt like a thud.  Kind of like dropping a sandbag.  Thud.  No spring.  No return of energy.  Thud.

As time progressed, it got to the point that I could not run at all without the inside of my right knee aching.  It didn't matter what distance, what shoes or what I tried to do to fix the problem.  Thud.

Back to the orthopod --> MRI --> small meniscus tear on the edge of the old meniscus tear.

"Doctor, if you were me, would you keep running?"

Brief pause.

"No."

"Thank you doctor."

This is when I took up cycling (which I truly love, BTW).  No more knee pain.  No more any type of pain really.  Kinda nice.

So why in the blue-blazes do you want to run again?  That will have to wait for a different post.