I am 11 months post back surgery now (finished Ironman Hawaii!!!), and although I can run with no issue at all, I spent the 1st half of the year plagued by severe back pain (same as year prior) when pushing power or hills. I was able to find a temporary solution in June by doing a Lumbar Nerve Ablation, but I’ve had ablations before and I know they are a temporary fix. I’d had multiple discussions with PT and doctors halfway thru the year trying to figure out a reason and a more permanent solution. The accident I had lifting the washer apparently was the straw that broke the camels back, literally! Haha! The general consensus was that my pelvis not staying in place was what was causing all of the pain. The pelvis stayed in place for a little while, and by April it wouldn’t last a day staying in place. This was also when half iron distance training ramped up as well. There are a couple factors that have probably led to this issue, I separated my tailbone completely, literally floated around fully in tact back there! I had an Ironman in Austria on tap, so I trained through that for 5 months. The PT tried to manually put the tailbone back into place a couple times, however my ligaments were so stretched at that time that they would not hold it in place. After Ironman and some time off I had my tailbone completely removed, and then 2 years later had a kid as well. My SI area was never the same post tailbone accident.
So what can you do when your ligaments are stretched and won’t hold your pelvis in place other than have it readjusted daily? Or have a nerve ablation everytime the pain gets too bad? You look at prolotherapy. We have doctors locally doing prolotherapy, however with the pelvis and SI area it’s a pretty specific area depending on where you rotate and such so the person I’d heard the best reviews about was in Florida. His name is Dr. Hauser, and he’s also done Ironman before so it helped me feel like someone understood not just the medical side, but also the athlete perspective. Below you can see an example of one of the areas I need to have prolotherapy on, along with a description of how it’s supposed to help. I’ll update you more after my first visit.
