I ran into a friend of mine who tore her ACL a few years ago. My favorite quote from her was "One day, my knee was fine and I forgot anything had ever happened to it." I am longing for that day.
Today, the two of us were meeting at a friend's house for coffee and we walked up the stairs together.
"Are you limping?" she asked me. I was mortified. In the past few weeks, other friends forgot I had had surgery and thought my gait was perfectly normal. Those friends didn't have ACL surgery themselves, nor did they see me walking upstairs. My gait isn't perfect on stairs yet. My post-surgical leg has less hop than my good leg.
"Yes," I said. "I have been lifting lots of weights and my legs are sore." That was true. The night before I was doing my three time a week routine of a dozen exercises. I am getting to the point where I sweat doing these exercises. I never sweat before when lifting weights or doing squats. Am I doing something right? Should I have been sweating before? Will I ever not be stiff and sore? Why can't I touch my toes anymore? I am now seven months post-surgery in a nine month recovery. Shouldn't I be coasting to the finish line? Instead, the exercises are getting harder.
My former project manager self thinks that if you plan things out and execute the plan, things should progress just fine. Often when I scheduled programs, I'd add in some slack in case a task took longer to complete or there was more work than expected. In those cases, work should finish sooner than expected.
This is not the case with my knee. I have been practicing standing on the BOSU disc, which is a large, round plastic disk with a squashy pillow on the other side. I put the squashy side on the ground and stand on the disk in a squat. My legs shake like I am having a seizure, but it didn't hurt. Evan explained that my nerves are trying to fire to help me keep my balance. This is part of the healing process that can't be rushed: I can't make my nerves grow faster, no matter how hard I try.
While I have stepped up my exercises these past few days, I have skipped biking to walk Green Lake with friends. I've also been gardening and doing other things around the house. Since I haven't been biking, the Black Dog has started to move in. I did and didn't realize how much forty-five minutes of cardio each day was keeping depression away. I made jokes about how mellow I was after exercising. I could feel myself relax, almost to the point of not wanting to be that relaxed. I've always had a little bit of an edge, and I was sad when it would get dissipated or blunted from too much exercise. The little voice that would tell me to make changes in my life would be a little too chill to tell me to do something different.
I need to get back on the bike. I need my exercise therapy.
This blog is about the little and big thoughts that pop into my head. I once read that when Flannery O'Connor walked into a bookstore, she would want to edit her published works with a red pen. In the digital world, we have the luxury of tweaking things up after we've hit the publish button. I can be a perfectionist/procrastinator, where waiting for the ideal means little gets done. Here I will share what is not--and likely will never be--perfect.
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