It's Not How Well the Dog Dances

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Copyright © 2019 Hugh Brock

I Bruised My Piriformis

3 January, 2020

No seriously. My Piriformis. Back in September I fell/slid down the companionway of our boat in France and landed on the left side of my butt. I got a grapefruit-sized bruise on there, and it turns out it included this muscle that is way down underneath the rest of your butt muscles called the Piriformis. I am capitalizing it because why not.

It turns out everyone with hips has two of these things and their job is to open your hips, that is to say pull the outside of your femur back toward your spine. I guess it’s a fairly important muscle although I had no idea I even had one — two, in fact — until I bruised it.

Anyway the tricky thing about bruising your Piriformis is that it runs right over your sciatic nerve, which is really a big bundle of nerves that pretty much operates your leg. When the damn thing gets bruised, it can get scar tissue on it, and this (I discovered) can produce an exquisite little inconvenience called Sciatica. Sciatica is another word for “My leg hurts so bad if I don’t sit down right now I’m gonna fall over, and also all my leg muscles are atrophying.” If you’ve never had it it’s hard to explain how debilitating it can be. Also having it and complaining about it of course makes you feel like an Old Man. It’s just excellent all around.

There’s not a hell of a lot more to this story other than that my Piriformis did eventually heal, with some help from an acupuncturist here in Boston who was truly excellent, and that took care of the sciatica. I still have some leg weakness three months later that I’m trying to train my way out of. I find this particularly disturbing because I’ve always had reasonably strong legs and it’s mildly horrifying to find out one of them can just sort of wither away over the course of a few weeks, because of something as trivial sounding as a bruised Piriformis.

Denn alles Fleisch ist wie Gras
und alle Herrlichkeit des Menschen
wie des Grases Blumen.
Das Gras ist verdorret
und die Blume abgefallen.

A decent translation is here…

Filed Under: Music, Rowing, Yoga

And Speaking Of Flexibility…

15 February, 2019

I did my third yoga class yesterday. It turns out to be a lot of fun, except that every time I bend over my enormous belly reminds me that I’m almost 51 years old and 40 pounds overweight. Sigh. Hopefully more yoga will help — I don’t expect it to help me lose weight, but maybe I’ll at least be able to move it out of the way somehow.

One thing I like about yoga, at least so far, is it doesn’t seem to make me stiff the next day like I was in a boxing match the day before. The battle against being completely seized up and walking around bent over like an old man gets worse every day, so anything that makes me more flexible is a very good thing.

There’s a bigger thing though, which has been apparent to me for a long time although I haven’t acted on it: I do much better at exercise with a supervisor. The chances that I will really push myself working out alone on the erg are almost vanishingly small. If I’m in a group or with a private instructor, though, I will obediently put myself through all kinds of searing pain just because they say I should. Why should this be so, I wonder? Suggestion and expectations are powerful things.

I’m pretty sure there is a lesson hidden in here about management…

Filed Under: Boston, Influencing Nerds, Yoga

Meet Hugh

I'm the Research Director for Red Hat, married to harpist and writer Kimberly Rowe, living in Boston. We lived in Brno, Czechia until pretty recently. Read More…

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