My forced downtime these last 3 days as I waited for my knee injury to get better made me a bit crazy. Between working out, doing yoga and walking the dog I’m on my feet moving for at least 6 hours every day. Adding in swimming for an hour and chores pushes that to around 8 hours of vigorous activity.
By this morning, day 3, I had it. Fortunately, my knee pain had subsided enough that I could walk the dog our normal distances, albeit much more slowly and wearing a compression wrap. Even better, I was able to workout this morning doing a complete pull-up and parallette workout. By the time I finished my pull-up workout, I felt like a million bucks. Breaking a sweat, breathing hard and cranking out reps literally changes my entire mood.
My gymnastics and yoga exercises were more limited because I cannot bend my knee more than 90 degrees without pain yet, but even those sessions were a joy to do.
I even swam – with very little pain – although I went slow and pushed off the wall ever so gently to baby my sore knee.
The best part about injuries is being able to get back into my normal routine. It makes me appreciate what I often take for granted and sometimes view as a drag.
Being able to walk, swim, crawl around, do deep squats, breathe deeply, roll around and move with grace and efficiency are extremely important to my mental well being.
And for the most part, it is all almost free.
For much of my life I hated gym class.
1st and 2nd grade gym class in my 4 room schoolhouse was awesome! We did gymnastics, we played red-rover, we danced with parachutes, threw frisbees and crawled around.
3rd through 8th grade gym class was a nightmare of failure and embarrassment. I was a fat, uncoordinated kid. I was terrible at the Presidential Fitness Tests we endured each year. I couldn’t do a pull-up, run fast, or hit a fastball.
By high school I had thinned out and was in better shape. I had gym with kids that were huge and athletic. Dodgeball truly sucked. Football and baseball weren’t much better. But I sucked it up and did whatever I needed to do to get an A in my quest to be valedictorian.
During this time, I had several valuable epiphanies:
- When we did calisthenics classes, pushups/windmills/situps/jumping jacks. I felt great. Afterwords I feel good all day.
- For the first time in my life, I started to enjoy running outside – even in rain and snow. My gym class had over 100 kids so one teacher would take us running around the neighborhood every Wednesday because there was literally not enough room in our gym to house us.
- I played full court basketball at a little gym near my house once a week at night with my friends against the “holy-roller” kids whose Christian School owned the gym. That year, I crushed the Presidential Fitness Test. Suddenly I could broad jump, run the 600 meter dash and was even acceptable in the 50 meter meter dash,
It all changed for me in 11th grade when I started lifting weights and running seriously. I became a fitness fanatic and never turned back.
Go figure.