Chris Curtis Web Site

I just had my last physio appointment. The hamstring strain is definitely not an issue any more, and the piriformis muscle in my hip is fully flexible as it should be. There is no pain, except a little under my heel first thing in the morning, which I can soon stretch off. I am back to running – albeit gently and carefully – and it is a matter of building up slowly and being faithful to the stretches and exercises.

The root issue seems to have been in my hip. The deep muscles that stabilise the joint are weak which has caused the piriformis and other muscles to over-develop to compensate. This, plus the general tightness and lack of smooth working together, has irritated the sciatic nerve, with implications right down the leg. My theory about this is to do with the pattern of my training and exercise. Because of my job and time pressures, I go from physical inactivity to committed physical exercise with very little in between. Aware of how little training I have been doing and how unfit I am, I work even harder when I can exercise. So I go from a day in meetings and office, to a 5km road run. Even with a warm up, there is little variety – from nothing to the big muscles working hard back to nothing. Uneven and unnatural muscle development and everything is out of kilter. If I push harder, I get hurt.

So the longer term plan has to be a greater variety of physical exercise, and more often. Light movement, lots more general flexibility, things which put joints in a much wider variety of positions and call on a much more flexible range of movement. Cross-training, in other words. I also have to keep up the physio exercises and stretches too. Access to the new fitness facilities at work will be useful, but it is about getting onto a real programme and building real fitness – not just going our for training runs once a week and orienteering on Saturdays. As the physio says – I am getting too old to get away with that! I need a complete programme in which orienteering plays a big part. Obvious really, it is just making it work.

If you can read this, the site has successfully moved to a new host. I am now with net-hosted.co.uk. I am extremely impressed with them so far (genuine comment – I have no connection or discount. I just chose them after careful searching).

There was nothing terribly wrong with my previous host (hosteurope=pipex)  but the package they offered did not really meet my needs. I have had recent problems with their service having very old versions of important software (like MySQL) and no real time scale for upgrading.