There Was a Crooked Woman

Just call me the crooked woman.

I’ve had this terrible stiff neck and shoulder pain for about three weeks.   I can barely turn my head to look over my right shoulder when driving on the highway.  Today on my way home from work, I stayed in the slow lane all the way home just to avoid having to change lanes.

I noticed in the mirror today one shoulder is lower than the other.   I think it looks alot worse in real life than the picture below shows.  Maybe it’s just in my head.  Or my neck.

This the the third time in three years I have had this issue:

The first time was during my Ironman training.   I ramped up my bike mileage too fast.   I was in a panic because I was in my peak training for Beach2Battleship, so I went to a chiropractor hoping to get back to the business of training as quickly as possible.   That worked out great, thank you Dr. Ed Raymond.   The adjustments immediately got my neck back to full range of motion, allowing me to continue training, but did not completely alleviate the pain.   The thing I loved about Dr. Ed was that he has a sports training background and gave me really good advice about how to fix the root cause of the problem.

The second time was last summer while training for Halfmax.   What set off the episode that time…was too much swimming combined with poor sleep posture, and bad form doing lat pulldowns at the gym.  Again, I was in the middle of my all-important training plan and could not afford to just ‘wait until it got better’.   So, I went to a different chiropractor that was located near work.  I did not like that guy at all – he just tried to sell me a bunch of crap and services that I did not want, and tried to convince me that I needed adjustments 3x per week for 6 weeks.   I went twice, and that helped some, but did not buy into his long term chiropractor sales pitch.

This time around I think it is due to too much computer mousing, bad sleep posture, and falling on my shoulder while using my roller trainers.   And since I am not training for anything, I am not in a panic for a quick fix, so I decided to just wait it out.   Well, that’s not working out too well.   I can’t tolerate swimming at all.  Forget about doing any crunches or P90X workouts.   Running is not too bad, but swinging my arms hurts alot – so I don’t enjoy running.    The pain is not horrible, but it’s really starting to grate on my nerves and make me crabby.   And, I want to get into a good workout groove, even tho I’m not training for a s specific race.   I need the endorphins to keep me happy.

Maybe I should buy a crooked cat?   And catch a crooked mouse.   Or, maybe I should just stop using my mouse!