Good-bye, 2016, the year of crap running. Hello, 2017!

A few days after Christmas, I had planned to run eight miles with a couple of regular running buddies.

But my hip ached -- again -- so I bailed, reluctantly. An MRI in November revealed a hip labral tear -- basically, the cartilage in the hip socket is torn and there is a bone spur or something like that.

The good news is I can still run a little, though nowhere near my usual mileage. This is good news for my family, too, since they have to live with me and a few miles is better than no miles.

I've made up the difference as best as I could with weekly weight-lifting classes and tons more biking and spin classes.

Like other runners, I love to track my mileage. I use Strava, an online app that makes it easy.

So as the year end approached, my ego piped up. I wondered what my mileage would look like for 2016, considering I've been injured basically all year, including during my worst marathon race/time ever last spring.

As of 12/30, I was at 992 miles.

Dang it. I could have hit 1,000 if I hadn't blown off my run earlier in the week.

Sometimes I'm smart and sometimes I'm a bonehead. So to get my miles up past the millennial milestone, I ran just over eight miles on New Year's Eve in Southwestern Michigan, discovering during my run the Wau-Ke-Na nature preserve trails.

Sure, the run felt like crap from the waist down, so I focused on how pretty the countryside was. It *kind of* worked, like eating fat-free ice cream and pretending it tastes amazing.

The Wau-Ke-Na nature preserve near Fennville, Mich. 

Thanks to that run, I finished 2016 with 1,001 miles, a nice big number accomplishment for a rough year of running.

And I biked 911 miles for the year, way more than I've biked in recent years and a function of being forced to do something besides run all the time.

My sports doc tells me that it can take two years on average to diagnose a labral tear because so many other things have to be ruled out as the root cause, like the hamstring tendon tear last summer.

We tried a steroid injection after Thanksgiving, but it didn't stick.

She says it's common in women runners who have had kids. Indeed, since having my daughter five years ago, the connection between my hip and hamstring has felt "stuck" and I've been in and out of physical therapy since then -- sometimes for hip stuff, sometimes back issues.

I really like running and kids. Bummer. But I wouldn't change the last several years -- I love being a mom and I love running.

Next stop is surgery. I meet with the surgeon this week. He's recommended by both my doc and by the ultrarunning community, so I'm feeling hopeful and optimistic about this next step.

And, eventually, I'll be back to full-fat ice cream.

Yum.