The bad and the ugly (not much good here): Part One

As promised, I am sharing some "highlights" from last week's 3D gait analysis at UVA. In case anyone has forgotten, I have been suffering from a variety of lower leg and foot issues for the past several years (more than two for sure). Before that, I was pregnant, and before that, I had my knee stuff (arthroscopic surgery in '08). I haven't been able to string together any consistent mileage (not without pain, anyway) in about nine years.

So I went looking for answers, or at least insights. I read about 3D gait analysis one night randomly (probably on someone else's blog) and when I found out that there was a facility less than three hours away, I had to look into it. And it turns out that my most recent PT knows the director of the lab and he was able to brief him on my case a bit in advance of my arrival.

Max, the 3D guy, also set me up with an appointment with UVA's head physical therapist, Eric Magrum, who is pretty well known as a runner-fixer. The only thing I couldn't make happen was an adjacent appointment with the medical director of the program, who literally wrote the book on running. But I still got a lot of info.

Here is the raw data I got. When you see that I was "running" at 5.3 mph, you will get a good sense of how much I've been struggling lately. I wrote a lot more here previously about the conclusions and recommendations I got, but then I forgot to save it. I'll let you all stew on this and then will report back in Part Two of this saga.