How 'bout them (Green)apples

Imagine yourself, out on a nice long run with a group of friends on a beautiful day.  You all stop for a moment to take in some water and nutrition, and you notice a slight nag in your knee.  You think to yourself, "huh, that feels a little funny."  You resume your run, take a mental inventory of your body and the sensation seemed to have disappeared so you don't think twice.  Not even the following week when you had to cut your run slightly short because of the searing pain shooting through your knee.  "It'll be fine," you tell yourself, "I'll just need to take it easy the coming week."  And that seemed to be the answer.  The following week was still a little ouchie, but nothing too drastic so you thought you could go on a hike the following day.  And you still thought you were fine, even when each step down hill felt like your knee was on fire. "It's okay, you just need rest."

Week after week, you keep trying different things to help it, to make it better.  Normal activity with ice and ibuprofen. Light running.  No running with different activities.  It'll be fine, right?  I mean, you think you're just being a baby about it, you just need to harden up a bit.  Week after week.  Then you finally realize it is not getting better and it's not going to get better without help.  

I've put myself on a running hiatus since Myrtle Beach.  This past Wednesday marked the end of the hiatus with a 10 minute run.  I used this as a test.  If things did not feel 100%, I was calling a sports doc.  

So, I called the sports doc.  The folks at Greenapple Sports and Wellness were kind enough to squeeze me in and fast!  I ventured into the big city of Charlotte (well beyond my 2-exit bubble) where Dr. Cooper took some xrays and assessed what needed to be assessed. Great news! I'm not broken!  Yes, my patella is riding near the outside of my knee, yes my IT band is tighter than Catwoman's cat suit and one of those two things is aggravating my "lateral femoral cutaneous nerve," which for the sake of this blog will be called the "cutie" nerve because I will never be able to remember nor spell that again.  But, it's nothing that can't fixed with time and hard work.  I can do that.

The moral of this story?  If you have a knobby knee and are dressed in a cat suit, your cutie nerve is probably embarrassed and you must get everything fixed.