run

Free Run, Day 14

Tuesday October 17th, 2023 

Bless me, readers, for I have sinned. It’s been one week since my last run. AND IT IS KILLING ME. 

Yes, you’re not reading that wrong, it’s been a week since my last run, and my spirit is conflicted and upset and I have missed the routine. So, last Tuesday, I felt great after my run, I really did. So much so that I wrote about it, you read it right before this post. I was feeling good. So I got home, had a smoothie, and then I took Pete for a walk down to 110th to Westside Market. It’s a 15-block walk both ways, so in addition to what I had run, I added a 30-block walk to my day. To be certain, this is a walk that I do all the time, oftentimes after I’ve come from a run, so I thought everything would be fine. 

Your girl thought wrong. 

On the way back from the store, my knee started to ache, then throb. I looked down to see it had become incredibly swollen. Not full balloon swollen, but enough that even with my leggings on, it was puffy. 

I got home and iced and elevated, but the swelling wouldn’t go down. It freaked me out. The run had felt good. I felt good on it, and what’s more, my knee hadn’t hurt. And now, walking on it, it swells up and starts to hurt. 

I don’t know what’s going on. My right quad has been super tender if I bend the knee, and I’ve been trying to stretch it as much as possible, but if I stretch it too much, it hurts. So I made the decision to take the week off and to let my knee rest. Well, rest as much as it can working a service job where I stand on it for 8 hours a day on concrete – seriously, it should be a law that service jobs have to provide anti-fatigue mats. It should be a law. 

The swelling has gone down, and the pain in my quad is better, so I think I made the right call, but y’all, I am 12 days out from this 5K, and I just missed a full week of runs. I’m in this incredibly conflicting headspace of like, wanting to continue to train for it while also knowing that if I fuck up my knee right now, like actually fuck it up, that would be BAD for next year, and just for life in general.  Which is why I’m relieved that I have PT tomorrow. I’m going back to Harkness because I trust them implicitly and because they’ve worked with this injury on me before and we’ll hopefully get a gameplan on how to move forward so that this happens with less frequency. Basically, I would love to build up the muscles so that the leg, in general, is stronger, and I can google how to do that until the corgs come home, but at the end of the day, I want a professional to look at my leg, to assess my knee, and to tell me what to do. 

This is me asking for an adult. 

Hi, will you be my adult? 

Also, y’all, I’m a hot little annoyed potato because if I’m being honest, I thought I would be stronger by October of 2023. And you might be thinking, look at all of the running you’re doing! You’re so much stronger. And like sure, but did I think my legs would be in better shape? Yes, yes I did, and let me tell you why. I’ve been doing this at-home workout program, the one that I’ve talked about a few times, and it just really hit me this past week that I’ve been swindled by it. Like, truly swindled. I was sold an entirely false bill of goods to be “coached” by someone whose idea of coaching is to upload 60-second “meaningful” videos to the app once a week and to send pre-written responses to completed workouts. I’m annoyed because I let it go on for so long. I’m frustrated for not having looked harder into this program, because if I had done a little more research, I would have found that a lot of people feel similarly. I’m angry that this keeps happening to me. That I let myself people please my way into getting swindled or taken for a ride because god forbid I speak up for myself even when I know I’m feeling like I’m being let down. 

This is a pattern in my life. 

And I’m tired of it. 

So this is also me, calling for myself to be the adult that I sometimes need. 

Hi, can I be my own adult? Just for right now? 

And I don’t mean that, like, I am the end-all-be-all authority on everything, not by any stretch of the imagination. A perfect example is me going to PT. I need help with that. Help that I cannot extend to myself. So that’s awesome; the PT will be the adult in that situation. But with this “coach” jabroni who I’m sure does this to other people as well? Nah. That’s all me, and that’s on me, and I am going to work very hard to ensure that I don’t find myself in another situation like this. 

It’s also annoying too because the signs were there from the beginning, right? Like, for one thing, most of their marketing and stuff on social media shows only a very, **very** specific type of body, and let me just be blunt about it, it’s not the type of body I have. Beyond that, there was very little body diversity shown at all. BIG FUCKING RED FLAG that I just blew right past, and for what?! FOR WHY?! 

You know what? I’m going to cut myself some slack here and tell you for why: because I thought I was getting a coach. I thought I was signing up for a program with someone who was going to engage with me and actively have my back, and that, in my mind, was worth the price of it all. And yet, I find myself having made minimal progress in the 6 months I’ve been “working” with him, and now I’m looking back at this half of a year being like what the fuck have I actually been doing?

I don’t know. It’s been a weird couple of days, friends. There’s a lot going on, and I’m off my rhythm with running, and I’m emotionally, physically, and mentally overwhelmed. I’m kind of at my capacity right now, for a lot of different reasons. I think there’s an anxiousness simmering inside of me that is making me feel like I should be at a different place. With my weight, with my running, with feeling strong. And I think that, again, is on me to shift that mindset. 

It can be very easy, and I mean VERY easy, for me to set some sort of goal. My life is kind of one string of goals, one after the other, which is wild because if you were to ask me if I’m a goal-orientated person, I don’t necessarily know that I would say yes, let me explain before you’re like you just said you set goals. I know I did, and you’re right, but the way I set them is what makes it feel like I’m not. Because it’s less like a goal, and more like an expectation. An expectation that I set for myself that I have to meet, otherwise I am a terrible waste of space, time, and energy and what was it all for. So, for me, back in March when I signed up for this program, the expectation was that in six months, my legs would be stronger. They would feel stronger. I would feel more secure. That expectation has not been met. And I think what is very unhelpful, and is a big part of how I think and is something that I am working on shifting, is that I forget sometimes that there is no real finish line. Even if I reach the finish line, life still goes on, right? Like, we can meet the expectation, but then what? It’s all a process. I’ve said that before, life is a process, and sometimes, I lack the ability to give myself grace inside of that process. I get so caught up on the goal, the expectation, the fucking finish line, that I forget to allow for my own humanity. And then I get mad that I have to even do that because I should be perfect, right? 

Ugh. I don’t know. Like I said, it’s been a weird few days. But I think a good and truly positive thing coming out of this is that I’m seeing these patterns within myself in a way that I haven’t been able to before. I’m seeing the cycles and I am actively trying to change them. Or at least make friends with them so I can one day change them. And that is progress within the process. 

Again, I don’t know. 

What I do know is that I haven’t run in a week. I know that I have an 8-hour shift later this afternoon. I know that I have PT tomorrow, and I am excited and scared to talk to them about all of this because they could tell me that something is really wrong with me. I know that this run I’m going to go on in a few minutes is going to be easy and light and the second I feel any pain or discomfort, I am going to stop. 

Little by tiny. Every day, little by tiny. 

POST-RUN MORTUM

Time Running: 42

Distance Achieved: 2.4 miles

Tunage: Phone Call With My #1 Reader – Holly Gould 

Yes, I went longer than I had originally anticipated, I was thinking I would do a quick 25 minutes and let that be that, but once Holly and I get to gabbing, that’s it. Also, shoutout to Holly, who reads every post literally the second it drops. It was never a competition, but y’all, they won. 

Knee feels ok. I walked a good portion of this run which I think was necessary, but I also ran a good chunk of it too. There is a slight twinge below my kneecap, which is a different spot than where it usually hurts, so I think my leg was compensating or landing differently. Either way, I’m going to run the nugget out for a quick walk now and then ice it before I have to go into work at 1. 

I’m super excited for PT tomorrow. I’m excited for them to tell me how I can get this knee stronger, this whole body stronger, actually, and to have a game plan moving forward that is going to work. Fingers crossed they say it’s nothing super serious and knock on wood that I’m not jinxing myself by writing this. We’ll see. Time will tell.