fit, happy
Fit
Don’t call it a comeback.
0Or, do. Far be it from be to dictate the contents of your vocabulary. Call it a Prussian revolution, if you wish. I don’t judge.
I hesitate to call it anything, frankly. I got so sick of writing about being injured that I quit (obviously). I think I may be beginning to start to show signs of getting better. Maybe. Possibly. But I’m not jumping to conclusions because I may be wrong. Please excuse me while I knock on everything within my reach that is made of wood.
The cost of a year.
It’s not the greatest photo ever, but it gets the general point across. Everything in the picture is something I bought specifically because of my foot injury. Shoes, shoe inserts, a night splint, a metal plate insert, ice packs, wraps, athletic tape, Kinesio tape, even a cheap rowing machine. Not pictured are dozens more rolls of tape, several more ice packs, bottles of ibuprofen, three doctors, two physical therapists, two orthopedic specialists, two x-rays, an MRI, a chiropractor, and a couple other shoe inserts and one more metal plate that I can’t find. It’s been a long effin’ year.
The final verdict (hopefully).
So what exactly is wrong with my foot? Here, let me illustrate with this helpful and informative diagram that I made just for you:
Not that I’m a doctor, mind you. But what the doctors think, when you add it all up (as far as I can tell), is that it’s a combination of tendonitis in the flexor digitorum longus (the tendon that runs from the bottom of your big toe all the way to your calf), plantar fasciitis (the ever-popular source of heel pain in the masses), and sesamoiditis (that little half-circle of bone that’s circled is a sesamoid. When it gets inflamed, it causes pain in the ball of the foot). The biggest problem is that the treatment for plantar fasciitis and the treatment for sesamoiditis are almost mutually exclusive. If I treat one, I am likely to aggravate the other, and that seems to be part of why it was so hard to diagnose – my pain didn’t present like any one diagnosis, and no treatment made much headway on my pain, it just moved it around.
All of the various injuries are overuse injuries, probably aggravated by the fact that I was working my foot out hard in kickboxing after taking a few months off, and because the after-school tkd program I was teaching was in a gym with a hard tile floor. I was doing everything barefoot, and the combination and intensity pushed my foot over the edge. That’s my best guess anyway.
At least now that I feel like I know what’s wrong, and the treatments are actually working in the expected way, I am starting to have both progress and hope, although healing not a fast process by any means. I still need to be on my foot to function, and staying off of it completely would actually make things worse, not better. So I still have to try to find a balance between enough moving around to keep things from locking up, and not doing so much that I cause more inflammation. The see-saw between the ball of the foot problem and the heel of the foot problem is the hardest.
I am able to work out a very little bit now, although by ‘work out’ I mostly mean ‘stand on my foot and move around a little for about an hour.’ But it’s more that nothing, and a lot more than I’ve been able to do in a long time. It makes a difference in my mood and motivation if nothing else.
Vacation
0Let me sum up: vacation. Day 1: walked, walked some more, lots of stairs. Day 2: sore legs, walked even more, and by the end of the day was in excruciating pain and spent all my concentration trying to make the 10 blocks back home without dying. Day 3: didn’t do squat. Day 4: walked a teeny bit. And there were monuments and stuff in there somewhere, I think. And a good supply of ice packs, heat packs, and athletic tape.
Seriously though, had a good vacation, and I saw most of the things I wanted to see…although the reflecting pool is somewhat less scenic as a giant construction zone. DC is a walking city, though, and I wasn’t really up to the challenge – not as much as I would have liked, anyway – but at the end of it I survived and my foot has bounced back well. God bless athletic tape.
Since then I haven’t done much: I celebrated my return from vacation by getting a cold and sleeping a lot. But that may have been just as well. My foot is slowly but surely getting better, and at this point I’m beginning to have hope that I might recover before I go batty. er.
Scale
0So, not to get to personal, but my butt hurts. I’ve been meaning to get a new bike seat, adjust it, get bike shorts, all that good stuff, but what fun is that? It was almost 70 degrees today for pete’s sake! In FEBRUARY. So I went out for a ride, and it was glorious.
I headed to a different trail than I’ve ridden the last two times – requires a little more highway riding to get there, but it’s flatter and a change of scenery. And it was gorgeous today – so gorgeous. The whole time I was riding out I had this nagging voice in the back of my head: “the wind is at your back. You have to ride back. Into the wind. You know you have to ride back, right? You have to ride back into the wind.” Needless to say, I did not listen to this voice, the pain in my butt, or anything but how amazing it was to be out in a t-shirt.
So then, I had to ride back…That part was less fun. I made it, but there were a few rest breaks, and a lot of wind to compete with, and of course the only hill on the whole ride is a block and a half away from my house. So I was a little wobbly when I got back, and I’m a bit sore, but you know what? Totally worth it.
…side note: I mapped my first rides the other day, and they came out to about 2ish miles. Peanuts, I know, but it’s the first time I’ve ridden in years. Today’s ride? 7 miles. Note that I do not map these rides BEFORE I go on them, like a normal sane person. What fun would that be? So I inadvertantly almost tripled my mileage.
Tomorrow I’m not sure what I’ll do, it’s legs and back day but I think my plan of staying off my foot is a good one and I should stick with it. But I’m not sure if I can go crazy with the biking or not…walking the dog, anyone? Or maybe legs and back without all the moves that hurt my foot, which is only, you know, practically half of it. Maybe half of legs and back AND walking the dog will count?
Roll with it.
0Finally back on track. I spent some time thinking about what was and wasn’t working for me, both in terms of motivation and ability. Basically I made two fundamental errors: one, I started P90x when I was still sick, and two, I started P90x freshly injured (strained arch). Because of being sick, I ended up being exhausted and worn down, and it took way too long to get back to normal. The foot thing has been an even longer, nagging problem, since it’s really not healing as well as it should.
The last thing that’s thrown me off has been simple cabin fever/lack of motivation. I can’t just flip a switch and fix all of these issues, but here’s what I’ve decided I’ll do. And that means it is applicable for approximately 24 hours from right now, and then I will probably change my mind and do something completely different. But I pretend to plan. Anyway…I couldn’t help but notice the silver lining of biking: no foot pain. So as long as the weather holds (probably until half an hour ago), I’m swapping biking/some other outdoor activity for all the P90x workouts that hurt my foot. So, Plyometrics, Yoga, and Legs and Back. This takes me pretty far from a true-blue P90x experience, but we gotta do what we gotta do.
In the meantime, I finally DID do P90x today. So it’s progress.
