Oh left leg, why can't you be more like right leg?

I went to see a chiropractor this morning, for the first time ever. The pain I've had in my left hip has not been getting better, and I figured better nip it in the bud now before it becomes really severe. Dr. Awesome (as I'll be calling him) was great. He's a runner too, so he had some ideas right away about what could be causing it.

It's his opinion that the hip pain is actually caused by my foot and how it strikes the ground. Because of a weak arch it's twisting too much and causing the rest of the leg to sort of swirl counter-clockwise, which ends up putting a lot of torsion on the hip. And that leads to "ow." I have a bunch of exercises to do, every 3-4 hours (not quite sure how I'm going to do them at work…), to strengthen the foot, ankle, and thigh. Fingers crossed, they'll strengthen the weak muscles, thus taking stress off the hip.

My four miles yesterday (on the treadmill) weren't pretty. I felt like I was unconsciously favoring my right leg over my left (which I know is bad), then trying to consciously stop. It was excessively awkward. Plus I'm still feeling a bit worn, so I wasn't able to go as fast as I've gone recently. On the positive side, I decided to turn it into a kind of half-assed hill workout and cranked the incline to 5 for a few minutes at a time. That made the time pass relatively quickly, and by the end I was pretty much pain-free. We'll see how things go tonight - I'm hopeful.