I don't really have much news to report regarding training/racing. My hip continues to fight against me, and the general pattern is something like this: hip feels ok, I start doing more activities, hip gets mad, I rest until it feels ok. Repeat. And repeat. And repeat. For a year.
I guess if I look at the whole trajectory over the course of the year, it is improving, especially if I compare the pain relative to the amount of activity that I am doing, but it is still certainly not normal. And I'm not certain that it ever will be.
But I try not to think too much about that. Sometimes things don't go quite as planned. This recovery has already taken twice as long as I thought it would. There are some injuries where you can push through the pain, tell your body to suck it up, and eventually get around it, but this is not one of them. This one just goes at it's own pace, and there isn't much I can do to speed it up. I still do physical therapy and try to wear the right combination of shoes to make it feel better, but really, the joint is just going to take as long as it wants to take to heal.
So I continue to wait and think about what is next. Sometimes I'm not really sure that bike racing remains in my future, but I am trying to just let it shake out over time. For me, bike racing has always been one of those sports that comes to me when the timing is right, so I'm just waiting to see if that happens, and if it doesn't, I don't know that I'll go chasing too hard after it.
This isn't to say that it doesn't suck pretty bad to slowly let go of a dream and a way of life that was so integral to my existence before. It still does suck pretty bad, even almost 2 years after this injury started, but I guess it sucks less and less with each passing day.
