injury & recovering.

July of 2022 and after nearly two and a half years of generally slouching, working from home, catching (and mostly recovering from) COVID, discovering a knee injury, and slugging out a lazyaf training plan (just barely) with the excuse that world had gone to shit, I decided I needed to turn it around. For reals.

This is what I am doing to get some...

active feets.

... a kinda blog about healing, restoration and recovery.
1 year ago

I started a video series to go along with all the writing about the Chicago Marathon I've been doing.

The introduction is pretty self-explanatory:

I'm hoping to post a video every 2 - 3 weeks, depending on my training progress and if I have anything of value to say. Right now, the "episode chapters" of this series will cover:

  • frozen feets (winter training)
  • feets & friends (an intro to the run crew who are going to Chicago)
  • daily feets (I'm hoping to do a streak around April)
  • thawed feets (spring challenges with training)
  • travelling feets (how to vacation in the middle of a training plan)
  • and more...
1 year ago

Change and healing takes a lot of time.

Time takes a lot of patience.

Patience is hard work.

I have willed myself to be more patient, and it is not easy.

As of this week it will have been seven months since my knee injury. Sure, I've been running for a few weeks now and even logging some reasonably distances, at least from the perspective of a guy who couldn't run to the end of the block a couple months ago.

As my (non-runner) friend replied to me when I told him I'd been logging some short recovery runs, "yeah... but what's short for you?" A short run, for me, is less than than a long run.

Time, distance, and patience are all relative measures.

I've been thinking a lot about my own personal motivation around healing. I mean, to me it seems obvious. In my own head my knee is wrecked and I can't run on it like I used to. I hope to get there, and I'm making progress, but I -- say -- couldn't do a half marathon right now. So... the knee is still broken in my opinion. And so there is motivation to get back to there, back to healed, back to being able to do what I could before.

"You have a good doctor." Someone reminded me, when I said that he was helping me to get to the Chicago start line. The obvious solution to the "it hurts when I run" problem (and I've heard that people have been told this) is "well... don't run."

Um. Sure... ?

There's no value in easy solutions like that.

Value comes from hard work.

Hard work takes a lot of patience.

Patience takes time.

Time and patience lead to change and healing.

1 year ago

Anything that isn't running, is cross-training... right?

Choosing to go for a walk on my lunch break rather than sitting and playing on my phone in the break room. Cross-training.

Choosing to ride the exercise bike while I watch an episode of television instead of slouching on the couch. Cross-training.

Parking at the far end of the lot when I go for groceries and strolling that extra distance to the door. Cross-training.

It might seem like I'm stretching (also cross-training?) to index some of these things to my training account bottom line, but on the other hand it's the thousands of little choices that one makes between now and the goal date that can make a lot of difference.

As I write this I have about 250 days until the start line of the Chicago Marathon, 2023.

Let's do a little math.

Adding, say, 1000 extra steps into my day (each and every day) is not a tough request.

Over two hundred and fifty days, that's 250,000 steps.

Conservatively, it takes about 1500 steps to walk a kilometer.

So, adding just 1000 steps into my daily routine means I add an additional 166 km of walking distance into my training routine, or nearly four extra marathons of training distance.

Sure, walking isn't running, but google "is walking important for marathon training" and you'll see a lot of reputable sources mention words like foot and leg strength, stress reduction, muscle stretching, and general lung capacity as benefits of walking.

All that benefit for a few extra steps.

My personal goal is to average ten thousand steps per day, that arbitrary goal that so many people strive for. It's an average though. Some days I'll walk twice that. Other days I'll do much less.

But of course it's the little choices that get me from a sad five thousand steps each day to a happy ten. Walking the long way to the office bathroom. Parking a bit further from the door at the mall. Going for a walk while I'm waiting for someone or something. Little things add up.

and more.