Bad Head Day

Okay. Enough.

I've been sick off and on with sort of the same cold/bronchial infection for four weeks. It's been one-step-forward-one-step-back, over and over again. Put this on top of my four weeks of overtrained/overstressed exhaustion in October, and you get someone who is extremely ready to stronger and healthier. Who doesn't have to think three times before he does anything, like get on a bike, eat a certain food, go outside.

So, I'm asking for your help. How can you help, you ask? Simple. You can inspire me. I know four weeks (plus however many more) is not the most people can be sidelined, not by a longshot. I need to put this in perspective, and I need to be inspired.

Post up your favorite stories of long lay-ups due to illness, injury, or other unavoidable annoyance. Times when, even though you knew better, it felt like you might never ride again like you used to. How did you get through it psychologically, fitness-wise, etc.?

Also feel free to post links to others' blog posts, videos, books, etc. Heck, I'll even take songs.

I had a really bad day. It's time to turn this attitude around.

Heal Already! Living With a Nagging Injury • iii

Third and Final Part. (Read Part One and Part Two.)

The second most annoying thing about nagging injuries: The variables.

Sometimes, I get to feeling a little better. I might even be able to do a hard ride and not suffer too much afterward. Was it the fish oil capsules a friend recommended to me? The glucosamine I started taking this week? The new stretch I’ve been trying? Or maybe it was just the cumulative effect of all the original stuff I’ve been doing for weeks and weeks – did I finally accrue enough benefit from the stuff the PT prescribed, so that I just now turned a corner?

Maybe it’s even some maddening, nebulous combination of the above. Probably is, actually.

Finding what I call “the end of the knot” (so I can pull on it and finally unravel the problem) can be really, truly, infuriatingly hard. Sometimes it seems foolish to even try; by tomorrow, I’ll probably just have another guess as to what caused my improvement. It takes a vast amount of will to keep at the project of figuring out what will help. I admit to three separate days when I was nearly in tears, wondering if I really cared for this sport enough to keep at this whole through the looking glass experience. I was barely a breath away from burying my bike under a bunch of junk in the back of my garage and resigning myself to long walks for exercise. Grim times.

And just going to the “expert” doesn’t usually dispel the darkness. Sure, I always walk out with hope springing eternal that the new diagnosis or exercise they’ve given me is finally the end of this. However, as I’ve said, doctors can be a bit glib about getting to the very bottom of a problem. Well, to be honest, it’s not very efficient for them to sit with me, digging endlessly through the layers of complication. So, I try to strike a balance: I do a little research on my own. I try out some stuff friends recommend. And when I get completely mired in the variables I’ve introduced by myself, I go back to the physical therapist (who is a great guy), do a brain-dump of the whole thing, and see if maybe I have managed to introduce some tiny new wrinkle that will help him finally solve this thing.

Now, here's where I admit that he actually seems to have done just that, about ten days ago. I went back to him after a long stretch of trying to solve it myself, and did one of those brain-dumps. I just blurted out, with no small relief, all the ups and downs and each and every desperate measure I've tried. He actually listened very carefully (you can't imagine how good that feels after weeks of obsession), and then he started trying a little of this and a little of that, all the while explaining some new levels of skeletal detail.

While he was chatting away explaining stuff, he almost off-handedly tried something that felt really different to me. I made him show it to me, went home and expanded on it, and voila – nearly instant and apparently reliable improvement. I won’t bore you with the fine points; if you have chondromalacia or ileotibial band issues, feel free to post a comment here and I’ll be glad to give details. The point is, I think… for today… that I’m out of the woods. Like the twelve-step people say: “One day at a time.” Fingers crossed!

And maybe that’s the upside of all that maddening confusion: You just never know when the next stinkin’ thing you try is actually going to be the end of all your worries.

Heal, Already! Living with a Nagging Injury (ii)

Part Two (Part One can be found here.)

So I actually did manage to be patient and follow the physical therapist’s strengthening and stretching regimen pretty religiously for a few months. And slowly -- very, very slowly -- I got better. It was very much two steps forward, one step back, but at least it wasn’t the other way around.

By March, I was riding a little harder and longer, and by April, I had almost forgotten I’d been injured. I’d been promising myself for months that, once I got to May and the insanity of my final semester of a multi-year grad school program was done, I would reward myself by riding as much and as hard as I wanted. I was salivating for this. Seriously.

By early May, I had gotten confident, strong and very happy. I was riding a little more intensely each week. I was building up carefully. I got to the point where I was doing climbing repeats on the steepest hill in town, and loving them to death (when I wasn’t heaving pieces of my lungs onto the blacktop.) It was going to be a great spring, after all. I was going to be at the front of the pack. I was going to shine.

And then one day I did one extra repeat on that hill, and felt a little twinge in my knee.

What? Did you expect a happy ending? Come on.

Now, the number one very most annoying thing about a nagging injury is that it’s impossible to tell the difference between healthily pushing the limits, and dangerously aggravating it. Often, I’ve pushed a little beyond my safety zone, felt a little ache here and there, and found out the next day that I had done a good thing. Instead of more discomfort, I would actually feel stronger. Then the next week, I might push it exactly as hard (or so it seems), and that night feel the hot irritation that signals the beginnings of re-injury. Then I have to pull back, and maybe even lose weeks of progress.

It was just that way on the very day of my last class in graduate school. I felt great after repeat number two, and so went for number three for the first time. That’s when I re-injured myself, and pretty good, too. It’s now seven weeks later and I’m still in the throes of recovery, progressing, backsliding, angsting over Web research, calling my PT. Yay!

Next: Repeat After Me: "My Knees Are My Teacher"

Heal, Already! Living with a Nagging Injury (i)

Part One

I’ve been living with a minor sports-related injury for about seven months now, and the fancy name for it is patellofemoral pain syndrome. Really, that’s just a ten-dollar way of saying that I have a problem that the experts don’t understand. It basically amounts to irritation and pain behind the kneecaps, and most of the gurus think it’s due to poor tracking of the patella when the leg flexes. Of course, the leg flexes many hundreds of times on a typical bike ride, right? So there you go: Recipe for nagging, recurring injury.

That’s the bumper sticker version of the science. What I really want to write about today, though, is the way that a nagging injury gets inside your head and fouls up your confidence, your athletic life and your sanity. There doesn’t seem to be much out there about that – which is surprising, considering how common sports injuries are.

When the injury first came along last fall, I buzzed off to my primary care doctor. He sent me to an orthopedist. Who sent me to a physical therapist. Which was where I wanted to go in the first place, but you know the wisdom of insurance companies: You have to go through the chain of command, or you get court martialed.

All three experts told me I had rock-solid knees, and I’d be back to 100% in no time. The cocky young orthopedist even turned on his million-dollar smile and said something like, “I promise you another 100,000 miles on those knees.”

Now, you’ll remember I said at the top “seven months,” right? It’s so easy for doctors to be optimistic about your recovery. If they turn out to be wrong, they just get more business. If we could sue for giving false hope, like we can for leaving surgical tools inside us, they’d be more circumspect, don’t you think?

The PT was one of those no-nonsense sports doctors: Young, confident, handsome. Runs his own business, always checking his Blackberry. Man of few words. Very nice guy, actually, and I think he’s probably pretty good. But I always worry that he’s finds me a bit neurotic. I go on and on about my symptoms, when they come, when they go, what the variables are, asking a hundred questions. I think he wishes I would just shut up and follow his exercise and stretching regimen. He knows I would get better; he's seen it many times. Meanwhile, he could put his attention on his other patients. There seem to always be other patients in PT offices, lined up on treatment tables and specialized equipment, waiting for attention from the doc, as if he were the maharishi about to bless them with his miraculous hands, so they could finally go run or swim pain-free. I wish they would all go away. Can’t they see that I need to get these knees fixed?

NEXT: The physical therapy actually works. For a while.