Back to parkrun after nine months and the heaviness came straight back the next day

Nine months. Nine months of doing what I was told, being discharged in February with a "you have done really well", and on Saturday I did my first parkrun since last September.

Ran the whole thing, which I had not planned to. Felt fine. Felt brilliant actually, cried a bit at the finish, the works. Sunday morning I woke up with the dragging heavy feeling I had in the first place and it has not properly gone since, and I have spent three days oscillating between "you have undone the whole thing" and "you are being dramatic".

What I want to know from people further along than me is whether this is a setback or a warning or just what happens the first time. And whether I go back to somebody or whether going back after being discharged makes me the person who cannot cope with being discharged.

Going back is not failing. I wish somebody had told me that a year earlier than they did.

Read your post twice and the thing that jumped out at me was "ran the whole thing, which I had not planned to".

Mine was similar. Nine months off, went back, and because it felt fine at the time I did further than intended, faster than intended, on a route with a hill in it, all on the same morning. Then I spent a week deciding my pelvic floor was broken when what I had actually done was change about four things at once and then measure the result as though it were one thing.

When I went back and did it properly it was tediously incremental. Walking, then faster walking, then bits of running inside the walking, and only then anything that looked like a run. Boring beyond belief and it worked, whereas the dramatic version did not.

I have wanted a thread like this on the board for a long time, so thank you, and I am going to be careful to say which bits are mine and which bits are anybody's.

First the part that is not opinion. No guideline in this site's evidence base sets a criterion for returning to running or lifting, and no trial in it measured one. So there is no week number, no test you pass, and anyone quoting a specific week as a standard should be asked which published source it comes from, because I could not find one.

What "ready" is built from instead is three things, none of which is a date. What the assessment found, which is whether the muscle can generate force, how quickly, whether it recruits automatically without you thinking about it, and whether it can let go afterwards. What happens under graded load, meaning not whether you can complete something once but what symptoms do across a session and across a week as load goes up in steps. And what a review shows. A return to sport decision made between reviews, on a good day, with no record, is a guess wearing a plan's clothing, and I say that as somebody who made exactly that guess.

Lindsey has already said the most useful practical thing on this thread. There are four variables and they get changed one at a time: impact, weight, duration and frequency. A first parkrun back moves impact, duration and frequency in a single morning, and if intensity crept in because it felt good then that is all four. Changing all four in one go and then finding symptoms worse tells you nothing except that something was too much, which is the least informative result available.

The bit I contribute from my own sixteen weeks, and it is the sentence I would most like people to take away from this site: the threshold moves before the event does. I spent the first eight weeks waiting for the leaking to stop and it did not stop. What changed at about week nine was that it used to start on the third hill repetition and started on the sixth. Same symptom, higher trigger, and I very nearly filed that as no change because I was watching for a yes or no answer. So record the point within an activity at which the symptom appears, not just whether it appeared. It is more sensitive than a tick box, it costs nothing, and it runs both directions, which makes it the best early warning you have that something is slipping after discharge. Which is exactly the situation you are in now. Returning to running and lifting has the staging and the mechanism in full.

On going back. Most people stop doing the full programme after they are discharged and the benefit does not collapse when they do, so please do not read Saturday as nine months undone. Symptoms that get worse under load are information rather than a verdict, and the response is reassessment rather than pushing on, partly because more effort is the wrong direction entirely if a floor turns out to be overactive rather than weak. Keeping it up after discharge covers the three things worth establishing at a discharge appointment, and one of them is how you get back in, which is much easier to find out while you are still a patient than afterwards. If nobody told you whether you can re-refer yourself or whether there is a time limit on returning to the same service, that is the call to make this week.

And what I cannot tell you is what the heaviness means. I am not a clinician, I have never examined anybody, and heaviness in particular is not something to interpret from a forum post. The person who assessed you in the first place is the only one who can say whether Saturday was a sensible step taken too fast or something that needs looking at again.

The "guess wearing a plan's clothing" line is going on my fridge. That is exactly what I did in January and I have been calling it a relapse ever since.

Right, update, and a slightly sheepish one.

I rang. Turns out I could self refer back into the same service within twelve months of discharge and nobody had told me that, or possibly somebody did tell me and I was too busy being pleased with myself in February to hear it. Appointment was the week before last.

The heaviness settled over about ten days on its own. She reassessed, said nothing had gone backwards that she could measure, and we have staged the running properly, one variable at a time, which after Saturday's triumph feels like being sent back to the start of the board game. I am doing it anyway because Lindsey's boring version worked and my exciting version did not.

Writing down the point at which things happen rather than whether they happen has already changed how I think about the whole nine months. I genuinely thought nothing had improved between week two and week eight last year. Reading my own notes back, that is not what happened at all.