Short anatomy lesson

Here's a sad ol' picture for you...



...my back.

The yellow line is a normal disk, the blue line is "medium to severe degeneration of L5/S1" and the red line is a "moderate disk extrusion at L4/L5". What that all means in layman's language is that the 'red' disk is pushing through onto my spinal chord, producing all sorts of sharp pains down my left leg when I'm vertical. I'm not keen on waiting the 6 months that it will (may) take to resolve itself, so I'm having cortisone injections next week which should get me comfortably vertical in about a week, though not yet running for some undefined time after that. I'm also assured that the procedure and its immediate aftermath is extremely painful, so I can't exactly say that I'm looking forward to it.

Anyhow, the short term result of all this is that I withdrew from 6ft on Friday, and I have no idea when I will run competitively again. Ah well, better go and log on to CoolSwimming... :-)

Gnome

p.s. looks like this is the last post to the old version of blogger. I'll post a brief test post to the new version in a little while. If you're using bloglines and you see this one but you don't see the next, then please go and manually re-subscribe. When I re-subscribed the other day to some of the other recalcitrants who have only just been pushed kicking and screaming to the new blogger, I found that I had to pick the last 'feed' on the list to get it to work. The first 'feed' was apparently still pointing to the old blogger. Good luck! :-)