Finding The Road Back
For Injured Athletes, The Uphill Battle To Heal And Get Back In The Game Requires The Upmost Perseverance And Determination
by Tam Thompson

Weightlifter And Former College Football Player Will Crosley
Years ago, in a game of pick-up football, Will Crosley accidentally ran into a merry-go-round on a playground, damaging his left knee. Earlier this year, he aggravated the old injury while playing basketball. As he describes it, “I felt a pop in my knee, and after that it was painful to flex it. The back of it felt tight and was burning. I had to elevate it at night. Being hurt did a mental game on me — I didn’t want to deal with the pain, but I didn’t want to have to take drugs, so I just didn’t work out as much. And when I don’t work out, I don’t feel good. When I don’t feel good, it shows.”
Fortunately for Crosley, he was already seeing a sports chiropractor, Dr. Jay Ding of Peak Performance Chiropractic, for a shoulder injury that began in 2001. “We use ‘active relief techniques,’” Ding says. “These include a myofascial stripping of deep-tissue massage on the muscles from origin to insertion. The techniques
encompass acupuncture for pain control and muscle relaxation, stretching exercises for range-of-movement and exercises for the patient to do at home.” Ding had already used these treatment modalities on Crosley’s right shoulder, in which a rotator cuff muscle and the long biceps were strained, causing a grinding, dull pain that robbed Crosley of his strength.
To bring Crosley’s knee back to a functional level, Ding added a few more treatment techniques to those he’d used on the shoulder, such as electrical stimulation during acupuncture and the use of an in-home muscle stimulator. Crosley recalls, “I didn’t fully understand all of the techniques that Dr. Ding used, but my knee is almost pain-free now. Some of the things he incorporates into treatment are incredible! It’s very motivating to realize that, gosh, I don’t have to deal with this injury for the rest of my life. I’m happy about that. I’m almost back to where I used to be, but I’m trying to not go too fast — I don’t want to relapse.”

Runner Troy Moon
If runner Troy Moon wasn’t such an upbeat, look-on-the-bright-side kind of guy, he might refer to being run over by his friend’s motorboat as a tragedy instead of “a funny little thing that happened.”
The friend didn’t mean to run over Moon, of course. They’d been giving a young women a water-skiing lesson, and a ski fell overboard. Moon leaned over the side to retrieve it and lost his balance. His friend was not an expert boater and, in trying to avoid Moon, he inadvertently ran over him, severing his hamstring and cutting his arm open from wrist to shoulder. “I was trying to protect my face from the propeller, so I put my arm in front of it,” Moon explains. He endured three surgeries (one of which involved an arm reconstruction with a tendon transplant), after which time his arm was in a sling for a year. At the time, Moon ran track for Baylor University. His running career had to be placed on hold for more than a year while he healed.
The motorboat accident, which occurred in 1990, wasn’t the end of Moon’s injury troubles. After struggling through agony-wracked surgeries and physical therapy sessions that brought him to tears, he finally began running again. But, in 1995, he began having problems with his Achilles tendon.
“I could only run every other day, because of the pain,” he recalls. “I guess I kept nursing it for years. I had a general practitioner look at it, and he said it was due to overuse. He gave me a cortisone shot and told me to lay off [of running]. I had the same problem again a month later despite tapering down.”
Unfortunately, this laid-back approach is all too common in doctors who are neither trained nor experienced in treating athletes. Moon eventually met an orthopedic surgeon who was a runner, and thus understood the unique concerns of injured athletes. “I was working at Run-Tex and Dr. Ted Spears was giving a clinic,” Moon says. “I told him about my Achilles pain and he said it sounded like it could be a ‘pump bump;’ a bone growth on the back of my heel.
X-rays confirmed Spears suspicion. A bone spur had grown on the back of Moon’s heel. With each step he ran, it gouged into his Achilles tendon. Even so, though, “Dr. Spears wouldn’t do surgery without trying physical therapy first. I was already down to running every third day, but I did what he asked me to do and gave my Achilles a lot of time off. After the PT, my injury healed a bit quicker between runs — I was able to run every other day — but it still wasn’t pain-free.”
With physical therapy providing only limited relief, Spears took a hard look at Moon’s running shoes. Together, they tried modifying the shoes, altering the shoe bed and inserting heel lifts. None of it helped. “At that point,” Moon says, “we decided that I was a surgical candidate. I had surgery in November of 1999. Afterwards, I had to wear a support boot for three months, and couldn’t run.”
For athletes, the pain involved in an injury is usually not the worst thing. The worst thing is the frustration they feel at not being in the game, not being able to maintain their usual workouts, at not being able to get that daily dose of endorphins. This can be horribly demoralizing. When Moon underwent treatment for his Achilles heel spur, he “wondered if I’d ever get back to where I was before all the pain started. One thing I learned was that if you don’t have a positive attitude during something like that, you’ll be swamped with depression. The bad feelings are like a little rock that can turn into a boulder and it’ll roll right over you. You’ll go under if you let that happen.”

Marathon Runner Sheila Anderson
Sheila Anderson had the same concerns about her piriformis, a muscle that is located in the upper buttock area. An old injury had caused scar tissue to form, pinching the sciatic nerve and causing pain that she describes as “literally, a pain in the butt.” In the summer of 2002, she saw an orthopedic surgeon, who took X-rays and an MRI to rule out a disc problem, and referred her to a physical therapist.
“Traditional P.T. didn’t help much,” she says, “even though I laid off running for four or five months. Going for so long without running was frustrating; I got to a point where I was pretty down about it. And then, when I started running again, the pain came back. It was upsetting, because here I’d taken time off, and missed two marathons, and it didn’t help.”
When a friend from the Austin Fit marathon training program spoke highly of chiropractor Chris Sellers of Performance Wellness, Anderson made an appointment with him. She says that he “did some adjustments, some myofascial release work, some electrical stimulation and some massage. I noticed a difference after the very first session,” she states with enthusiasm. “His goal was to break up the scar tissue and stretch out my muscle. I’ve been going to him regularly for about six weeks now, and my running is good again. It’s not completely pain-free; I noticed a twinge or two after each of the 10-mile runs I did recently. But I’ve signed up for the New York City Marathon in November.
I’m pretty ecstatic now, because I missed running so much.”

Physical Therapist Cullen Tennison Strives To Keep His Patients In Action
The benefits of a good workout are addicting, and it can be difficult for health-care professionals to convince athletes to take time off to let an injury heal. Cullen Tennison, a physical therapist who owns the Wellness Matters clinic, takes the approach that “you can’t just tell people not to work out. They’re not going to sit idly on the bench. You have to get them to substitute other activities.”
One of Tennison’s patients is a female road cyclist who suffered a severe ankle sprain last December. He recalls: “She laid off, and the pain decreased, but then in March of this year, it came back. She tried getting a cortisone shot. That helped for a while, but under the stress of cycling, the pain came back. Her goal, which she’d had for several years, was to go on a bike tour that follows the Tour de France route. And now she’s over there right now, on the tour, having a wonderful time.”
Tennison relieved her pain primarily by using manual therapy and deep-tissue work. “The initial injury to her ankle caused some muscle tightness,” he explains, “but then hobbling around on it made it even worse. Her muscles hardened to the point that they were interfering with her circulation. She had limited dorsiflexion (the ability to pull the toes up toward the knees), so I did a lot of deep-tissue massage on her to restore full range of motion. We also worked on some balance techniques to get her ankle working properly again.”

Another of Tennison’s patients was a man who had recalcitrant shin splints due to a stress fracture. He’d tried taking a break from running, but every time he eased back in, the pain returned. After looking at the man’s gait, Tennison noticed that he “was pretty strong, but his injury was hampering his ability to dorsiflex, and the deep muscles between his calves and his shins were tender.” Tennison performed some deep-tissue massage on the man, and asked to see his orthotics. “One of them was cracked, so I did a patch job on it, and we arranged to get him some new ones. I also did some ultrasound on him to increase his range of movement.”
In the beginning, the treatments reduced the runner’s pain, but he still wasn’t able to run yet. He walked three to five miles regularly to maintain fitness, but even as little as a block’s worth of running hurt. Tennison says, “He had the Couer d’Alene Triathlon in Idaho coming up, and he was getting worried. We gradually worked him up to being able to run before the event. During the triathlon, he wisely chose to follow a predetermined run/walk plan rather than trying to run the whole running leg and breaking down.”
Tennison advises injured athletes who are finding it hard to lay off and allow things to heal that “if you persist in running, or doing whatever, on an injury, you’re going to wind up keeping yourself out of the game, and there’s a good chance you can turn what would have been a minor surgery into a major one. It’s not worth it.”

In short, if you’ve got a nagging sports-related injury, play it safe and go see a health-care professional who specializes in sports injuries. You don’t have to drag yourself through pain-wracked workouts — you can probably get relief from pain, and even restore your performance to preinjury levels. You’ll be amazed at what a good sports medicine practitioner can do. And perhaps above all, remember the roll you play in your own recovery; having a positive attitude is the name of this game!
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Photos:
Will Crosley receives neuromuscular re-education therapy from Dr. Jay Ding, D.C., at Peak Performance Chiropractic.

Photo page 38 (from left to right): Troy Moon and Dr. Ted Spears of Sports Performance International. Photo page 39: Troy Moon doing rehabilitation exercises.