bodies_in_motion

mad_m posting in

Hello fellow Bodies in Motion! Wondering about your stories of healing and recovery. I'm on the road back from a long layoff from running related to overtraining and muscle imbalance, and a major rock fall last September. Without getting into the details of the problems (long, boring, trust me), I finally owned that I'm getting older and simply taking a few months off with stretching just won't cut it anymore. That was a long road of getting past depression of not being able to move the way I wanted, at the speed and with the power I used to.

I hate it when I get the advice from medical professionals or massage therapists to not run, not push it, perhaps take it easier - I found the right mix of body work with an acupuncturist. After a few months of work with her, and on my own (stretching, rolling muscles, and pushing tennis balls into my trigger points at home), I'm now able to do some walk-running, body weight exercises, and the occasional short dyno at the rock gym. I also got outside to lead a few easy sport routes over Easter weekend. I used to be too proud to mix running into my walking, wouldn't climb routes I thought were beneath me, and didn't think strength training had a place in improving my climbing (totally bought into "if you want to climb, then climb!") In short, I was holding myself back with standards that my injured self couldn't meet, standards that were arbitrarily set. After letting them slack a bit, I realized how much I really can do after all, and that I'm on the road back to where I want to be.

What are your stories of breaking and rebuilding? What personal myths did you need to overcome?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

lunabee34

I had to get over the idea of the runner's high or the idea that I was going to have this euphoric experience when exercising. I know it happens for some people, but it hasn't happened for me, and I don't think it's going to. I had to stop being disappointed about that.

I also had to get over the idea that I was going to be able to do a lot of running on the ground. I run on the elliptical, but that's so different from running on the ground. Running on the ground really activates my interstitial cystitis, and it hurts my knees. I do it occasionally because it does work different muscles (or when I'm on vacation and have no other exercise options), but I had originally thought I would turn into this person who could run around the neighborhood, and I just can't.

Congratulations on figuring otu what works for you. That's awesome.

From:

mad_m

Thanks, I appreciate the congrats! Finding the acupuncturist was a step forward. :)

Regarding runner's high, I'll throw out an idea as good for thought... maybe be more subtle than what you're expecting... if you're not able to run for a few days, how do you feel? It could be that rather than feeling an endorphin rush (think of waves with high amplitude, low frequency) your body releases them at a lower rate (lower amplitude and more in the background), such that if you don't get your exercise (and related endorphin dose) you miss the feeling?

From:

recessional

Some of us also really just don't get it. Promise.

From:

ladybrooke

As one of the people who does not (and never has) gotten runner's high, I feel better not running. Running is painful, and there's no way to make it not hurt, with my health issues.

If it's subtle, it's not even good enough to make up for the amount of pain it causes.

From:

lunabee34

That's a bit closer to what's going on.

I feel much less anxious and angry (which is a huge mood probably with me; I am kinda permanently pissed and it's horrible) if I go consistently. I don't necessarily feel anything on a specific day, but I definitely feel a cumulative effect.

From:

thistleingrey

Indeed, contrary to euphoria, if I exercise enough, I stop feeling usefully protective amounts of discomfort, and then I usually reinjure stuff. Heh. Glad it's not just me!

From:

lunabee34

Eeeep. That sounds maddening.

From:

alexseanchai

I think I'm only just starting in the "rebuilding" part. Like. I didn't used to be this thoroughly disabled. (Or if I was, I was ignoring the fact, and what has changed is my ability to get away with that.) My brain keeps going on about "you used to could, why can't you now?" and like? hi, disabled? and we can argue about the nuances of the social model of disability from here to eternity but the word "impairment" is in there somewhere regardless?

ugh. :(

Best luck with getting back where you want to be!

From:

mad_m

The mind-body connect where your brain is cajoling, then scolding, your body is a bitch, isn't it? Poor body, here's to rebuilding!

From:

snippy

Learning that adequate recovery time is the key to resilience. I spent most of my life thinking it was normal to be exhausted all the time, so long as I was moving fast and doing all the things. Only in the last few years I have been forced to rest after multiple surgeries and an asthma attack (put on forced bed rest by doctors), and discovered that there's no such thing as pushing though for me. I have to rest enough to recover; I actually have more capacity to breathe and walk at my normal speed after a week of walking slow and a day or two of rest than if I keep pushing myself every day to make progress.

From:

ivy

Yes, this is what I'm working on at the moment too. I seem to need two or three times the recovery time that most other athletes who do what I do need. So they can Crossfit five days a week and build strength. I just get less effective, and if I push it enough, injured. I do better if I mix it up -- one day biking, one day rock climbing, one day Crossfit... but even so, I won't get the peak performance from any of those that I would if I did a week of sitting around and then did the thing. So at the moment, I'm trying to find the right balance between training hard and training stupidly such that I don't see the gains because I'm never letting my body heal.

From:

snippy

It's been a hard lesson to learn--and all the harder because the standard advice permeates the communities and the atmosphere. But six months of only exercising once a week gets me further than six months of doing what "everybody says" is the best way to build muscle and stamina.

I've always said I'm a slow healer, slow but thorough. Recovery from illnesses and surgeries takes me a lot longer than other people. But I heal all the way if I let myself heal at my natural pace. Paying attention to something as simple as how it feels to walk a little slower instead of as fast as I want on any particular day makes a difference.

From:

geekturnedvamp

For me, learning about anatomy and physiology and biomechanics has been helpful, because having a more realistic understanding of the capabilities and limitations of the body (both in general and my own body in particular) gives me some perspective on my limitations. That said, I still have to remind myself daily that part of the reason I can't do some of the shit that a lot of my classmates--who are almost all current or former dancers/yoga teachers/super fit personal trainers--are able to do is that they're significantly younger than I am, have spent many more years doing this than I have, and spend more time practicing than I do. (Especially the first one, because while intellectually I know that age makes a real difference in how quickly we can progress in physical training or recover from injury, I look much younger than I am and that makes it easy to keep forgetting that my body is actually older than I think it is.)

From:

fred_mouse

Like one of the other posters, I had to learn that the myth of 'a little bit every day' doesn't work for me. I've been doing marked steps up in functionality very slowly by every January setting a physically challenging daily goal, and at the end of January (whether I met it at all, sometime, every day) stopping that. For me, this is easy to manage, because it fits with school holidays, and so when school goes back, I stop whatever the thing is.

As a result, I've gone from unable to run at all, to being able to do a couple hundred metres at a slow run.

I've also had to move outside the standard kinds of get fit activity that are common around here (gym, running/jogging, swimming) and find something that makes me work hard without making breathing so hard that I don't bother. As a result, I've taken up figure skating (hello mid-life crisis bad ideas) and ballet, both of which are doing great things for muscle strength and my cardio-vascular health.

From:

mad_m

Figure skating doesn't sound like it's been such a bad idea if it makes you feel good! It seems to be a very technique driven thing, though. How long did it take to get from just putting on skates to making spins and jumps?

From:

fred_mouse

Figure skating at the enthused adult amateur level isn't necessarily about technique (depending on the coach - they shuffle the classes every term, depending on coach availability and how fast the class is progressing), although they do incrementally teach a lot of skills. I think it took about 2 years to get to the very first spins and jumps, and I feel I've barely got better at some of them in the intervening 2.5 years! It's really interesting in one way, that the more I feel like one of those 'in motion' pics of the really good skaters, the more likely it is that the jump or spin will work -- some of that posture really is about the physics!

From:

mad_m

Wow! It sounds like you have a lot of focus and patience to really work at it, a combination of speed and skill to pull off those moves...

From:

fred_mouse

I think I'm more stubborn than patient - I *will* eventually get this working, despite the issues that my body has. But I find it hilarious to consider that in terms of figure skating skill, I'm at least in the top 1% and probably the top 1 in a 1000 (or more) in the state, just because we are a mediterranean climate, and we have four rinks (that I'm aware of) in the state, and they are all in the capital, and so most people never ice-skate!