Patterns of Injury

My legs are deliciously sore. Because I haven't been doing my physical therapy and I have been lazy in exercising.
My new physical therapist had me stop running until we could build up the lower back and SI joint that the doctors are thinking is the real problem with my hip and locking pains. Last week I got to start running again, but only twice and at broken intervals of 2 minutes. Then he did a gate analysis on my run. I was on a treadmill so that likely made my gate different.
A few interesting things were found:
1. I am taking too long of strides and this can be problematic. This is interesting because as a competitive runner in high school it was always about lengthening your stride, but now the goal, or at least my goal is to get more steps per minute. We used a metronome to make this happen. Apparently 160 is what is best for me to decrease risk of injury.
2. I am too high. My stride that is. I am almost jumping in my stride. The more steps per minute help bring me back down so I am spending more energy going forward instead of up. This is interesting because it also reminds me of high school running when I learned to pump my arms straight, breaking the natural cross-over pattern people's arms follow when running, thus putting your energy into moving forward instead of side to side. This too high is also rather comical because... well, I am too high and needed a mood stabilizer to bring me down so that I had the energy to move forward.
3. I swing my right leg. This is very strange and I am not sure how or why I do this at the point of the gate analysis, but as I have run since I have reflected on this a bit. I feel that my injury had my foot loose like an over-stretched elastic that no longer returns to its normal size. I remember getting out of the car after the car accident that injured this ankle and feeling like one side of my body was now longer than the other. So it makes sense that while running I would feel a need to swing this longer over stretched leg. I have been doing it for so long now that it will take conscious effort to correct. This is so true of all the adaptive behaviors we do.
I have been fighting to understand my mood instabilities and discrepancies and trying to take care of it myself for so long that it is taking significant effort to correct some of these behaviors. I don't really need to work so hard to understand anymore because I think I understand it really well now but rather I need to figure out how to stop trying to figure it out because that is such a ingrained habit now. Yet that is not nearly as significant or as difficult as learning to not try to do it all on my own. That part is tricky. Especially since self reliance and independence is a highly valued trait in my culture and society.
What is also interesting about this gate problem and the correcting of it is that I am relearning things that have come very naturally to me and I used to be very talented at, but that were dramatically effected by an initially overlooked and seemingly insignificant injury that was left untreated for too long.
This is a pattern that is common in many ways and many lives.
But what I love about this new pain is that I feel muscles alive and working in ways they have not felt in a very long time. Somehow shortening my stride is making those muscles come back to life. And that makes me happy even if it also causes some pain.