Soreness after running

[ajm222]

And I should add that I also have some sciatica type pain (dealt with this some long before hernia off and on) and a history of some groin pain not related to hernia (also dealt with this off and on before the actual hernia developed). And I even had some testicular pain on and off that may or may not have been related to the hernia (had a vasectomy a few years before as well). So this is all complicated by some other issues and to hard to say for sure where some of the pain stops and starts. And some of the pressure and tightness is further up my abdomen and my right side and almost into my chest, and it would seem strange for that to be related to the hernia surgery and mesh. Pretty sure I’ve changed my posture and my gait as a result of my worries, almost as a subconscious protective measure, so that could be contributing. I know small changes in the way people sit or stand or run or walk (or even sleep) can have big consequences over time in terms of body pain.

[ajm222]

quote Jnomesh:

I decided to weigh in earlier bc you said you were in some pain/tightness in the area and it’s been a good amount of time since your initial surgery (well over a year ) and in addition most of you your pain I think you said comes after running.
So to me that kind of automatically puts you into a different camp then some people who after at most a few months out from their surgery are say 100%.
Your situation isn’t necessarily something to be worried about and like you mentioned isn’t like a lot of the stories you read on this forum, to me it’s just a reminder that something is being aggregated at the repair site and you are lucky that you have a indentifier that makes the area act up (running).
With those two pieces of information I would proceed to just air on the side of precaution.
Experiment with your running routine and make changes until hopefully you get to the point where You can enjoy running and also feel no pain due to it at the same time.
Good intentions is right in the sense that mesh behaves by its own set of rules and how it acts and incorporates into muscle and tissue and the pain symptoms you are feeling post running can be a reminder of that.
The fact that you said when you take off a couple of weeks from running you feel better to me logically indicates that running is aggravating something and the odds are if you haven’t felt this before surgery then it has something to do with the surgery.
Hopefully, you can modify your running routine to the point where you are pain free.
Best wishes.

good advice, thank you

[Jnomesh]

I decided to weigh in earlier bc you said you were in some pain/tightness in the area and it’s been a good amount of time since your initial surgery (well over a year ) and in addition most of you your pain I think you said comes after running.
So to me that kind of automatically puts you into a different camp then some people who after at most a few months out from their surgery are say 100%.
Your situation isn’t necessarily something to be worried about and like you mentioned isn’t like a lot of the stories you read on this forum, to me it’s just a reminder that something is being aggregated at the repair site and you are lucky that you have a indentifier that makes the area act up (running).
With those two pieces of information I would proceed to just air on the side of precaution.
Experiment with your running routine and make changes until hopefully you get to the point where You can enjoy running and also feel no pain due to it at the same time.
Good intentions is right in the sense that mesh behaves by its own set of rules and how it acts and incorporates into muscle and tissue and the pain symptoms you are feeling post running can be a reminder of that.
The fact that you said when you take off a couple of weeks from running you feel better to me logically indicates that running is aggravating something and the odds are if you haven’t felt this before surgery then it has something to do with the surgery.
Hopefully, you can modify your running routine to the point where you are pain free.
Best wishes.

[ajm222]

i appreciate the perspective. I’ll say that most of the success stories i’ve found on these other forums, however, are people who are very active in the first place, and most of them seem to have resumed their activity to the same or to an even more strenuous degree, and seemed happy with the results, saying they should have done it sooner. i didn’t really see many people (or any) saying they’ve had to be careful or slow down at all. once they got past the first few months they were back on the horse. the worst i saw were people saying they get on occasional twinge or something along those lines. or folks who had multiple hernia operations over the years. it’s an interesting contrast to the stories i typically see here and some other hernia-specific sites. they seemed more representative of the types of numbers i’ve seen in the literature. it’s difficult to make heads or tales of it all, though.

[Good intentions]

Sorry ajm222, that’s my negative view, the other side of the argument.

[Good intentions]

I think that most surgeons don’t think out the full cycle of damage and healing. or they do and just pretend it doesn’t exist. When we exercise we damage tissue, very small tears and cell damage. Normal healing results in stronger muscle and other tissues like ligaments. They get thicker and stronger. With mesh the damage reinvigorates the foreign body response, plus, since the polymer fibers of the mesh are essentially inelastic, any pulling inward of the mesh that happened with activity gets locked in by the new healing response as more “healing tissue” is added on. You can also easily imagine how the edges of the mesh can get pulled inward and folded, since there is no mechanism except the fibers’ stiffness, to push the edges back outward.

Most of the problems of mesh are easily explained by standard physics, mechanics, and material properties. I think that most of the success stories out there are really stories of people drastically reducing their activity levels.

[ajm222]

quote Jnomesh:

I think taking a few weeks off is a very logical way of examining your issues. If you feel better then I would try and change your running regimen and see if it helps-ie maybe less often, more days rest I’m between runs, shorter runs or less stenosis runs.
I enjoyed lifting weights before my mesh hernia surgery and I can say I never felt right post surgery and a lot of my symptoms came about after a workout post mesh repair. With rest they mostly subsided. For 5 years I altered exercises and eventually reduced the amount of lifting weight I was using with better results .
Surgeons Like to make out the hernia repair as of people will be Superman and can do whatever they want. Personally I think this is a flawed reasoning. Understand that you have a piece of plastic in you that is on, attached to and near a whole bunch of anatomical structures.
id try as best it enjoy your hobby and pastime without over doing it and pushing yourself.
Unfortunately for me 5 years after surgery the pain and symptoms I was feeling the first 5 years became 10 fold and the mesh had to be removed as it was eventually found to be balled up and rock hard and on all sorts of structures it wasn’t supposed to be.
And although I’d like to think this was a rare occurrence I do believe it is served as a reminder that you did have a surgery and do have a permanent piece of plastic inside of you-this do your best to lead a balance life when it comes to sports and activity-the pain you are having is a reminder of your repair area-try not to overdo it and push thorough it-experiment and find a balance if there is one between modifying your workout, living pain free, and most of all not aggravating something in that area and making things worse down the line.

Thanks, Jnomesh. The balled up mesh story I most think of is yours. The good news is that I have never been really big into exercise since I stopped playing soccer as a young man, and not the type to spend a ton of time in the gym or running marathons. But I’d like to hope that I can get to a point where moderate exercise is comfortable. I simply want to be active enough to maintain my health. I’m 43 now and it shouldn’t take much to accomplish that.

I don’t think I realized how long your issues went on and that they got progressively worse so long after surgery. Will have to keep an eye on things over time and make sure they’re getting better and not worse. So far I would say that’s been the case, however the progress has been so small and so up and down that it’s hard to quantify.

[ajm222]

Thanks, Dave! Very interesting to hear that. It’s reassuring to hear from someone else who is so far along and still feeling some discomfort. Sounds similar to mine. Hard to find folks more than a few months out that are still around to share their experiences (that’s probably a good sign in general). I often try and go to other forums where the focus is not specifically hernias and hernia surgeries, in order to get a more balanced sense of people’s results. I go to forums for runners and cyclists and climbers and search for stories about hernia surgery, which I’ve found useful because it tends to start with someone asking about what to expect, while several people who had it years before chime in about their stories. Seems that most people have good results, but I often see people that say they spent a couple of years, sometimes more, dealing with soreness or tightness that seemed to be exacerbated by activity. And it seems for most of those folks the discomfort eventually went away. But it took a long time. Even my neighbor said it was about 18 months before he felt totally back to normal. It’s very frustrating when so many say they were 100% after a few months. But everyone is different. And of course there are probably those that have lingering issues that just don’t really go away. But I’ve also seen a few studies that suggest that 5-10 years down the line all or very nearly all who reported pain (even severe pain) have seen it resolve.

In my case I feel like I am amplifying it with my worries. I spent a lot of time before surgery reading about worst case scenarios and may have gone into it with a subconscious expectation of failure and chronic pain. Just read an interesting NPR article about emotional sources of pain that higher parts of our brain can create or perpetuate even in the total absence of physical damage. And I’ve personally been in touch with an expert in the field who suggested it’s very likely the type of pain I am experiencing is related to that. But I also think this area of the body is particularly prone to lingering effects of surgery that for many just take a lot longer than advertised to resolve.

Any surgeon I’ve spoken with has said keep running/exercising – you won’t hurt anything – it will only help. But it’s probably not a terrible thing to take a week off now and again.

I think my biggest worry is failure of the repair, or that somehow the mesh migrated. This is the thing I don’t really understand. My surgeon and so many others seem to suggest that the way the mesh is inserted in a robotic lap operation makes it nearly impossible that it could move around at all. I do understand that certain types of mesh in the past (the 3D-shaped ones in particular) might fold over in some cases because of their shape and the way they sit in the inguinal canal. But migrate? I just don’t get that. But I worry about it.

Anyway, thanks again. Hope over time you continue to improve and feel better and better. And maybe after a week off I will do the opposite and see how it feels to run for 5 or 6 days straight.

[Jnomesh]

I think taking a few weeks off is a very logical way of examining your issues. If you feel better then I would try and change your running regimen and see if it helps-ie maybe less often, more days rest I’m between runs, shorter runs or less stenosis runs.
I enjoyed lifting weights before my mesh hernia surgery and I can say I never felt right post surgery and a lot of my symptoms came about after a workout post mesh repair. With rest they mostly subsided. For 5 years I altered exercises and eventually reduced the amount of lifting weight I was using with better results .
Surgeons Like to make out the hernia repair as of people will be Superman and can do whatever they want. Personally I think this is a flawed reasoning. Understand that you have a piece of plastic in you that is on, attached to and near a whole bunch of anatomical structures.
id try as best it enjoy your hobby and pastime without over doing it and pushing yourself.
Unfortunately for me 5 years after surgery the pain and symptoms I was feeling the first 5 years became 10 fold and the mesh had to be removed as it was eventually found to be balled up and rock hard and on all sorts of structures it wasn’t supposed to be.
And although I’d like to think this was a rare occurrence I do believe it is served as a reminder that you did have a surgery and do have a permanent piece of plastic inside of you-this do your best to lead a balance life when it comes to sports and activity-the pain you are having is a reminder of your repair area-try not to overdo it and push thorough it-experiment and find a balance if there is one between modifying your workout, living pain free, and most of all not aggravating something in that area and making things worse down the line.

[Dave Graham]

Very interesting question. I’m at nine months post open- IH surgery with mesh. I am a life-long runner, (used to be pretty competitive) but I was very cautious the first few months-no running at all, just walking. I am now doing @ 30 minutes easy, five or six days a week, and I also work on my feet most of the day (tourism). I have some sporadic pain and an almost constant feeling of tension in the surgical site. Not sure if the running contributes to it, because sometimes I have the feelings on days when I don’t run. I am willing to put up with a little pain as long as the procedure did what it was supposed to do, but I’m sure you will agree, it would be nice to be pain free after this much time. Hope you get some useful response to this.