I’ve been dealing with groin pain while running for about four months now, and I was wondering if anyone else has dealt with a similar injury.
It started about one year ago, and it would be a nagging lower abdominal pain right at the start of a run, for about 4-5 minutes, and then it would go away. Later in runs, the discomfort would come back, and it felt like it drifted down to my testes. I finally learned I had kidney stones earlier this year, and I had surgery to remove one that was stuck. Up until that point, I was having a fantastic triathlon season with great times and feeling totally healthy. But I had to have the surgery due to recurring bouts of extreme pain, as kidney stones do. I figured that would do it for my lower ab pain after surgery, but no, it came right back, and now it’s different and worse.
After the surgery, since I was sitting on the couch for about one month not exercising much, when I finally started running slowly again, I had adductor pain. I went for PT, and the recommended motion was to do hyper extensions of my lower back to release some nerve impingement in my lumbar region. That seemed to help initially, but the pain is still there. And now it’s worse yet in a new way.
The best way to describe it without being too graphic, is to say that after any run of length 5 miles or greater, my rectum hurts. It feels like the muscles connecting the top of my hamstrings to my glutes and in that lower region just feel sore. After I shower, and I’m stepping over the edge of the bathtub, it is difficult to lift my legs. When I go to dry my feet, it’s hard to even lift my feet to dry. Meanwhile, I still have the sensation in my lower gut, just below my belly button, which is reminiscent of the original pain from last year. Basically, my whole core feels jacked, from lower belly to adductors to rectum to even a sort of general tiredness in my upper quads.
For what it’s worth, I generally race about 12 times per year, and I do Ironman racing. I was aiming for Louisville and Cozumel this year, but that went out the window. Point being, I’m familiar with soreness and tiredness during training, and this is nothing like I’ve experienced in previous years. Something is wrong. My urologist, who performed the kidney stone surgery, checked me out 2 weeks post surgery and said whatever I was experiencing was non-neurological. I went to an orthopedist, and he gave me a scrip for PT. But he had nothing to recommend with regard to the rectal area pain/discomfort I feel after running. My PT also said that was outside his expertise, although he felt that as my adductors improved, my general core should stabilize in terms of the pain I’m feeling, since all of this may be somehow referred from my lower spine.
Okay, enough detail. Has anyone ever dealt with pain like this from running before?