Latitude Physiotherapy
2024-01-26T04:35:08.227Z
I want to express a huge thanks to Dr. Gumbs on helping me race my first half marathon and return to running after so many years of having being down and out due to injury.Years ago as a teen cross country runner, I had regularly gotten sidelined because of overuse injuries. I experienced multiple stress fractures in both tibias and my foot. Following high school, I suffered from lingering chronic leg pain in my left leg that just never left -- in fact it affected me for over a decade through my twenties and early thirties. Over that span, I couldn't consistently run without the pain overwhelming me. I missed running and racing a lot!However, my journey changed for the better once I started working with Dr. Gumbs. Like me, Dr. Gumbs had been a competitive runner, and he knew what it was like to battle injuries that felt intractable. He had been through a similar situation in college.Nevertheless, I was skeptical of physical therapy in general. I had been to a ton of PT when I was a runner in high school, and looking back, I was so disappointed by it. The experience for me was not personalized at all -- I would get only 5-10 minutes to talk to the PT, before they would send me to do a list of exercises by myself while they moved on to the next patient.Fortunately, Dr. Gumbs was absolutely nothing like that. All of our sessions were one-on-one and his focus was very personalized. Our first session was 90 minutes long, and he thoroughly listened to me talk through my injury history. He asked me tons of questions and examined my movements -- comparing especially the performance of my left vs. right leg.He walked me through the science of how chronic pain is different than short-term, acute pain. He put together a treatment plan that not only targeted my inner leg (where it hurt most), but also my hip and back, which were weak/tight and contributing to the leg pain. He would carefully make sure I was performing the exercises correctly, and as we met each week, he would re-examine my movements, hear how my week went, and add new exercises based on my progress. One week, he filmed me running on a treadmill, and we spent quite a bit of time examining both the strengths and inefficiencies of my gait. He helped me set up a running plan, in addition to an exercise and stretch plan.My pain wasn't solved overnight, but as I stayed consistent with the training plan, it became less noticeable. I started to build the confidence to run again without fear, and eventually I was able to build up to running over an hour non-stop. When I felt ready, I signed up for the 3M Half Marathon and finished in under 2 hours. After years of struggle, I NEVER thought that I could achieve that. But now that I have, my next goal is to race a marathon.It's hard to express how much it means to me to return to running and racing, because it was such an important part of my life that was lost for so long. Without Dr. Gumbs' care, patience, knowledge and support, I would not have gotten this far. For that, I can't express how happy and grateful I am!