Spiral

So last week I wrote optimistically about "moving past the depressed injured athlete phase" of my recovery.  This week, I'm beginning to realize that the "moving past" is not a straight shot, but more of a spiral in which you revisit the various stages of recovery again and again. Right now, it seems to be time to revisit the "depressed athlete" phase.

In other words, this week I'm gonna whine.

Looking at things objectively, I should be happy.  I can walk, I can drive, I can swim and I can do the elliptical and I can row.  I've got great customized CrossFit workouts to keep me busy, and I'm seeing progress with my upper body strength--last week I PR'd my bench press at 100 pounds, and my strict pullups at 2 consecutive.  I was even able (with my physical therapist's blessing) to do Burpees--one-legged Burpees, really, and I can't say it would distress me too much to still be banned from doing Burpees but hey, it's progress.  I'd even been fairly successful at sticking with Paleo recently.  So what's there to whine about?

Well, like I said...objectively, nothing.  But for a lot of reasons, this has seemed like kind of a rough week.  My ability to sit semi-comfortably had been improving...and then this week I maybe pushed it too far, starting with a dinner out and then compounding that with lots of sitting on hard chairs in the staff lunchroom.  At any rate, my leg has been hurting a lot more than usual this week.  The Oval opened for skating on Friday and I can't skate, lots of people from SISU are doing a CrossFit competition this weekend and I can't do CrossFit, and hot flashes and perimenopausal mood swings have been running rampant the past few days.  And all of these things pissed me off enough that by Friday night, I'd had it.  I was sick of my leg hurting, sick of not being able to do the things I love, sick of having to think, every time I move or bend over or get up or down from the floor, about how I'm going to do it without risking re-injuring my leg.

So of course I did the logical thing Friday night: I indulged in the mood-elevating properties of pizza, cookies, and (free) ice cream at a local pizza place.  There's no mood so bad that junk food can't make it better...before, of course, the regret sets in and makes it worse.

This morning, though, I decided to go to the oval for the first long track ice session of the season--not to skate, just to smell the ice and watch the skaters and talk to my friends--even though I realized I was risking making myself even more depressed by going to watch something I'm not able to do.  It was a beautiful day for skating, though...

Doesn't that just make you want to skate?

...and despite a few initial pangs when I saw the ice and realized that I have as many weeks until I can skate as I've had since the surgery, I was still glad I went.  It was fun to talk to my friends and see how excited they are for the start of the season.  And I tried jogging a bit around the blacktop track outside the oval; I can now make it about 100 yards before I start limping.  So that's an improvement, and it was a fun morning...and so the recovery spiral continues...