I have a long and storied injury history, and my body definitely doesn't heal (short and long term) like it used to. This is very sad and annoying, but it's also my life so I am learning how to deal with it.
My biggest problem area is definitely my left knee, followed by my right knee (from favoring the left), then my left hip. Sometimes my ankles hurt, but not often. Right now my left foot is still recovering from the scooter accident so any "pushing off" movement aggravates it. Day to day, though, it's all about keeping the knees happy.
I find that the #1 thing I can do for my knees is to exercise every day. It keeps the supporting muscles and tendons and ligaments strong, keeps the healing nourishing blood pumping through the area, prevents fluid buildup, and the stretching done before and after exercise keeps the entire area more limber.
That said, I have to carefully balance that exercise with respect for what my joints are telling me and not overdo the exercise. My lungs might want a run, but my knee is demanding a walk, so I take a walk. Low impact exercise is good too, like swimming and the elliptical machine, depending on the nature of the discomfort that day.
After the scooter accident aggravated my knee injury I decided to take the long view on it all and stop trying to run for distance. Now I run for speed. If that is a problem too, I'll just cap my speed and live with that. No biggie. When I move to SF I'm going to sell my car and buy a road bicycle and tool around on that to get around town. That should be good for my fitness and good for my joints and good for the environment. Everyone wins!
I just hope that my "crashing two wheeled vehicles" habit doesn't turn into a trend.
This post was adapted from a comment left on a friend's blog.
6 comments:
Holly-
Wear a helmet in the city. Road biking is great for commuting, but as I learned this past weekend, there is a big difference between someone who rides as a workout and someone who commutes. If you're aiming at long fitness, cycling and swimming can do you almost no harm, unless you continue to have two-wheeled accidents......
I'm a safety girl, so no worries on the helmet. And you saw correctly, I'm aiming for long term fitness, not to win any races or anything. Almost no harm is exactly what I'm hoping for.
I can't tell from your comment if you ride as a workout or for commuting. :)
I have a question unrelated to this particular entry. Your progress meter on the right -- is that autogenerated somehow or are you just updating your template manually whenever you feel like it? I am looking for a good and unobtrusive meter to post for NaNoWriMo. Last year's was clear, but kind of big, but I was using someone else's work, so I shouldn't complain. In any case, Seppo, Klay, and I have to post three different word count meters, so it'll be nice to have a small one.
Yeah, unfortuneately that sucker is exactly what you feared it is: a manual part of my template. I see no reason why one couldn't write a cgi script which lets you update your weight/word count and stores that in a file locally, then write another bit of code that spits out the HTML for the meter given the name of the user or some such. I've thought about doing it, but I'm too busy writing scripts for work so far.
That's a lame excuse, actually. I probably could have written it in the time it took to describe it. But mine I would want to go to my weight logs and find the latest weight and update from there.
Damn. :D
I also enjoy that you are 831% done. ;)
Aw, why did you have to go and change that? :D
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