Monthly Archives: March 2010

Remember the feeling of renewal that came with back-to-school shopping when you were a kid? Every new shirt (or every pair of Z. Cavaricci pants–I grew up in the ’80s, after all) carried the possibility of a new teacher, new classroom, new opportunities.

I was reminded of that feeling last week, when I started running again after six weeks of basically no cardio whatsoever while I recovered from wrist surgery.  My first 20-minute run back was exhausting but exhilarating. The next day, I hopped on the stationary bike for 45 minutes. The day after, it was running again, this time for 30 minutes. I’ve alternated between the two ever since, and I think I’m finally getting over the initial shock of how sore my legs were after so little activity.

What I haven’t gotten over: The sense that I am starting anew. Sure, it stinks feeling exhausted after 20 minutes of easy running when, just months before, exhaustion came after running 20 miles. My endurance feels pretty much gone. But you know what else is gone? The hip pain that had hampered me pre-wrist-break. This week, I’m finding motivation in the fact that I’m getting a fresh start, and from the “back to school” goodies helping to celebrate that novelty:

* Ron at Punk Rock Tri Guy sent me this awesome hat, which is made of sweat-wicking material and is emblazoned with a logo that’s sure to help me channel my inner punk rocker before races or speed workouts:

* A brand-new training log, courtesy of Ken (a.k.a., @boulderrunner). After a brief stint on dailymile.com, I realized I really prefer to log my daily workouts in an actual training log. He had an extra one and sent it my way. Scrawling my first week  worth of workouts in it gave me such a sense of accomplishment!

* A “new to me” toy: the Garmin Forerunner 305 I received for Christmas, but barely got to enjoy before I broke my wrist. I brought it on my easy 30-minute jog on Saturday to get an idea of my baseline fitness level, preparing to be horrified at my lack of speed. The verdict: 3.22 miles at 9:18-minute-mile pace. As I finished the run, my glee upon seeing these not-so-bad stats was compounded by my iPod skipping to the perfect song for my current situation, “Get Right Back” by Army Navy. The cover song, which is peppy and fun even without the message, left me feeling like getting right back to where I started from wasn’t such a bad thing after all.

What’s motivating you this week?

My wonderful, glorious, exhausting first run back last night almost didn’t happen. Here’s how it went down at the doctor yesterday at my one-month post-surgery checkup:

Doctor, casually, after briefly examining my wrist:  I think we’ll probably put you in a cast for another two weeks.

Me: ((Weeps silently))

Doctor: So I’ll see you in two … ((notices silent, pathetic weeping)) Aww. C’mon. ((Uncomfortable silence as I continue weeping)). You’re the type of patient I want in bubble wrap. For active-duty patients like you, I really think that’s the best route.

Me: I’m not active-duty! I’m a freelance writer! I sit at a computer all day — I’m very still, really!

Doctor: But you’re probably more active than most of my active-duty patients.

Me: ((Sullen silence))

Doctor, after giving me a long, hard Look: Do you promise you’ll wear your splint 24 hours a day?

Me, nodding vigorously, possibly bouncing up and down in exam chair: I’ll be so good! Tell me what not to do, and I won’t do it! I promise! I promise!

Hellooo, splint!

I still don’t get to start occupational therapy until after my next appointment in a month. Also, when I asked if I could drive my manual-transmission car again, the nurse looked at me like I had asked if I could resume bench presses. But as my doctor, a runner herself, and I yapped about fall marathons yesterday afternoon as the technician made the breathable splint that would allow me to run again, I had a hard time feeling too disappointed.

The run itself later that day was glorious. I made the mistake of mentioning to my doctor that I’d planned to run an easy 30 minutes. She gave me another Look, and suggested 15 minutes might be more appropriate for the first day. Every one of those 15 minutes (okay, fine, 20 minutes) felt amazing — tiring in the best way possible, and familiar in a way that made me feel like I was coming home to myself. My quads ached on the hills, and I was more out of breath than I’d like to admit, but that was OK — I’ve been working on cultivating an attitude of acceptance of the way things are right now rather than only focusing on future goals, so I resolved not to think about pace, but instead to appreciate how good it felt to simply move. Plus, running, for any distance, at any speed, made me feel alive again.

Beaming after my first run back with my new splint.

Later that night, my wrist would feel swollen enough that I held the “Statue of Liberty” position for the entirety of LOST. But when I first walked back in the door, chilled from a brisk March wind and out of breath from the exertion, I only felt joy.

Today, I’ll take a quick spin on the stationary bike. The FIRST training program had been working well for me before my wrist surgery, so I figure there’s no reason to abandon it now. I’m actually looking forward to the bike ride, which I usually see as a necessary cross-training evil. And I’m looking forward to my run tomorrow — my first “real” run back.

I started swimming competitively when I was seven. I learned to ski and started doing gymnastics that same year, and from that point on, I don’t think I’ve gone more than a week without doing some sort of physical activity. This means that, for better or worse, my understanding of my body is inextricably tied to the belief that a normal day includes a vigorous workout of some sort.

As you can imagine, this is mostly a positive thing. I’ve spent my life seeking out steeper slopes, longer races, rougher waters, and other ways to challenge myself and broaden my idea of what I’m capable of. I’ve gotten to take exceptionally good health for granted, and I’ve used exercise-induced endorphins to boost my spirits through rough times.

Here’s the downside, or at least a strange side effect: My concept of how I use my body is so tied up in the idea that I can and should do some sort of physical activity every day, I somehow got to the point where I believe that’s the body’s most important purpose. You know this feeling: it’s the part of you that wants to wrap your legs in bubble wrap in the weeks leading up to a marathon, eschewing all other activities (camping, backpacking, having wine with dinner) to make sure your body is ready for that all-important race day. It’s the part of you that feels fat and lazy during a taper, even though you know you’re still doing more exercise than the general population.

I found tips on how to change that thinking in a surprising place: a blog post about body image. It calls for accepting the way things are now–something I do rather infrequently, it turns out. Think about it: How often do you pause to appreciate where you are right now before striving for a better marathon time, a faster tempo run, a harder cross-training workout? Here are some of the takeaways I’m planning to practice this week:

Self-acceptance means acknowledging where you are now, and not repeating the mantra “I’ll like my body when…” For me, that’s “when I can be active again.” Why not appreciate my body now, rather than abiding an overriding feeling that I’ll suffer through the next few weeks until I can next go for a run?

Think of all the amazing things your body can do. Gary, the race director and marathon runner who’s recovering from almost the same wrist injury I am, put it this way: “This month off was different from just slacking for a month. My body has probably been putting a lot of energy into healing. I had surgery just a little more than two weeks ago. And all these crazy drugs I’m not used to…” As much as I feel like a lazy slob for being on the couch for a month, my body is actually probably pretty worn out from doing things like healing wounds, building bone and getting used to the fact that there’s a piece of titanium in my wrist now. And yes, the crazy drugs…

Ask yourself: What are some of the feel-good things I can do now for my body? By nurturing your body as it is now, you can begin to feel comfortable with yourself. Now this one, I’m not having such a problem with. Here are some of the ways I nurtured my body over the past few days:

By enjoying an awesome Italian dinner before seeing Avenue Q on an impromptu trip to New York …

By soaking in the spring sunshine on a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge …

And by relaxing in Rock Creek Park with Steve when we returned home. We packed a picnic lunch (mine: a sandwich with multigrain bread, cheddar cheese, and apple slices and fig jam procured from the Silver Spring Farmers Market on Saturday), and spent hours lazing by the creek and reading (my book: the excellent What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami).

I can’t help but think that this perspective will help me once I start running again — which could happen as soon as tomorrow, depending on how my doctor appointment goes. Wish me luck!

Pro runners always talk about tuning into their pain when they race–that winning requires a certain awareness of just how awful it feels to push your body to its absolute limits.  Sports psychologists say even amateur athletes can benefit from staying in the present rather than distracting themselves to disassociate themselves from pain.

I’m more of a “crank the iPod until it’s over” kind of girl myself, and I’m using similar distraction tactics to avoid going nuts before my next doctor appointment March 23, a week from tomorrow. I should get to trade my purple cast for a splint, which means I should get to start resuming my regular activity for the first time since surgery on Feb. 24 to fix the wrist I broke snowboarding.

Here are a few of the happy distractions keeping me sane, which are motivating me to get to next week:

Remember my quest to find stomach-friendly running fuel? I may not be running right now, but I’m still experimenting with fun and interesting runner-friendly recipes. I’m still totally jazzed about adding pumpkin to a wide variety of foods, with soups serving as my latest experiments. This week, my minor pumpkin obsession and an apparent canned-pumpkin shortage in local grocery stores led me to do something a little bit crazy: I actually ordered a dozen cans of pumpkin from Amazon.com to make sure I always have some. Somehow, knowing I didn’t have to wait to buy a favorite food made me feel more able to be patient until my next doctor appointment March 23.

I have to wait a week to get my cast off. I wasn't about to wait for pumpkin to be restocked, too.

I’m reading the books I didn’t have time to while I was training for a marathon. Among them: Running With the Buffaloes by Chris Lear, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami, Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (not a running book, but if I can get through that monster, I can get through recovery, too). Stay tuned for reviews.

I’m planning a trip! We were supposed to go to Stowe this week, but I deemed spending several days in a ski town without any skiing to be the most depressing thing I could think of. Instead, we’re going to New York to see a play and have a fabulous dinner in Little Italy! Details to follow.

Finally, like a runner focusing on crowds of cheering spectators to take his or her mind off the pain of a race, I am distracting myself by focusing on your helpful and inspirational comments, including those from Gary, a marathoner and race director who’s recovering from an injury that’s practically identical to mine, and my friend Tiffany, who has a great approach to her recovery from ankle surgery. She responded to my post about the truce I’m calling with my body by sharing her own recovery goal, saying she’s “going to spend the rest of 29 healing, so that when I turn 30 in June, I can hopefully be healthy enough to live the life I want to live.” I love this. If I can just maintain the truce until May 20, my own 30th birthday, I feel like I’ll be happier and healthier for it.

Lara at Saturday Morning Zen says after getting through the “anger stage of not being able to run,” she actually enjoys the stillness. It’s the idea of “sitting with injury” that they talk about in yoga classes, and she says when she’s able to “sit” with whatever feels uncomfortable, she’s stronger for it when she gets back to running. This is a little bit revolutionary to me. This strategy seems to be half distraction and dissociation, half tuning in to the pain. It’s how I survived the two-hour drive from Whitetail to the emergency room at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda with a badly broken wrist. It involves accepting the pain (or discomfort, or annoyance), then moving on, and I could stand to improve the “moving on” part. Wish me luck with that this week…

Regular readers of this blog know that during my first marathon in 2007, I became a big fan of cheesy motivational quotes. They have helped me a great deal in my efforts to keep my brain in the right place while recovering from surgery on Feb. 24 to fix my the wrist I broke snowboarding, but this week, I recognized it was time to find some new ones, too. I reached out to runner friends on Twitter and in person, and came up with the list below. If you’ve got a favorite motivational quote you feel would help an injured athlete stay positive while she’s sidelined, please share it by posting a comment below.

“There is more to life than increasing its speed.” Gandhi

“In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.” A. Camus

“He who argues for his limitations gets to keep them.” Richard Bach

“Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.” Helen Keller

“Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” C.S. Lewis

What else keeps you positive when you can’t run? Let me know by posting a comment below.

***EDITOR’S NOTE: If you found this post helpful, check out my recent shout-out to all of you who have posted here, Coping Tips for Injured Athletes. ***

When you’re training for a marathon, there comes a time when you have to tweak your training schedule to make it fit into the reality of what your body needs. When your hip still aches from your long run over the weekend, you cancel your scheduled speed workout on Tuesday. Conversely, you know that when you feel totally fantastic after a tempo run, you can throw in a couple of extra strides before heading home.

I thought I’d gotten really good at listening to my body, and giving it what it needs–even when that conflicts with my idea of what it *should* need. But almost two weeks after surgery on Feb. 24 to fix my the wrist I broke snowboarding, I’m becoming aware that actually, it’s more like my body and I were at war, and I have decided to declare a truce.

This war against my body wasn’t the obvious, “My thighs look like sausages in these jeans and I hate them” kind (though I occasionally fight those battles, too–don’t we all?). It was more of a Cold War of disappointment in which I constantly spotted flaws or shortcomings.  One of many examples of what I’m talking about: I’ve only been unable to run for a few weeks now, but it already seems silly–no, crazy–to me that running 8:30-minute miles rather than eight-minute miles during a group run could leave me angry at my legs and confused about why they conspired with my lungs to fail me.

It’s the downside of pushing your body to perform better, and it can be really helpful in challenging and expanding your ideas of what you’re capable of–when it’s not creating an ugly, unfair pressure-cooker environment. My goal for this week, the third after surgery, is to declare a truce while my body heals. Here’s what the truce means, and how it applies to everyday training as well:

• I’m making health my main motivation. My love of working out started with health, both the mind-clearing, endorphin-pumping mental kind, and the obvious physical sort.I started paying attention to pace and distance only as a way to keep myself motivated. Along the way, I started putting some serious pressure on myself — pressure that had nothing to do with my resting pulse or my cholesterol or disease prevention. My No. 1 goal right now is health, in a great big general sense, which makes my hiatus from working out a lot easier to take. After all, an infection is about the least healthy thing I can think of, and that’s what I’d risk if I sweated at all right now. There are worse, less healthy things in the world than a couple weeks off from serious training–though I’ll certainly enjoy returning to it when it’s time.
• I’m focusing on making sure I consume enough of what I do need rather than berating myself for eating too much of what I don’t need. Right now, this means eating foods that will help my body heal–increased calcium, protein, zinc, and vitamins A and C, according to organizations like the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons and the Cleveland Clinic. And as long as I’m eating my plain, nonfat Greek yogurt, I’m not going to sweat the fact that I put a bunch of dark chocolate chips in it (chocolate aids healing too, right?).
• I’m focusing on what my body can do rather than what it can’t. I’m annoyed that my wrist still gets sore at the end of the day, and that my hand swells when I don’t keep it elevated in a sort of Statue of Liberty stance. Why not congratulate my body instead for no longer needing mid-day naps–a sign the major, hard-core healing is done? I’m still really digging Deena Kastor’s suggestion of “forcing the positive” until it feels natural, and that’s what I’m going to continue to do in celebrating incremental milestones.
• I’m also pushing patience. In recovery and in training (and, let’s face it, in life), it’s tough to take things week by week, and to be flexible about your goals when things don’t go as planned. But most of us value that feeling of meditation in motion that makes us feel like when we’re running, we are living totally in the moment. I think my recovery can be a lesson in that, too.

Have you ever consciously declared a truce with your body? Which battles were you fighting? What tactics helped you reach peace?

I had my first doctor appointment on Tuesday after surgery last week to fix my broken wrist, and I wanted to share the good news: Everything is healing up nicely, and on schedule!

I will see my doctor about once a week until my recovery is complete. She’s encouraging me to take my recovery, and my return to activity, on a week-by-week basis, and I’m starting to think this is a pretty good strategy. One week is a short enough period of time that I can suffer through almost anything, from unbelievable pain, à la last week, to a slow return to normacly this week. At the same time, a week is long enough that I can see a real improvement. A week ago, my wrist still hurt so badly, I was counting down the minutes until I could take my next maximum dose of Percocet. I’m going on my fourth day without any Percocet at all, and there are a host of other indications that this week marks a new phase of my recovery:

• First, there’s the rest of my doctor’s assessment. When I bragged that I’ve been taking seriously the charge to do absolutely nothing, my doctor, a runner herself who’s aware that I’m a runner who is anxious to get moving again, smiled and told me she could tell, because everything is healing “perfectly.” Luckily, my desire to be perfect (personality flaw) actually trumps my endorphin addiction, so this was exactly what I needed to hear. And I got the official go-ahead to go for walks, provided I don’t risk infection by sweating, and to move my fingers, my elbow and my shoulder in ways I’d previously been avoiding.
• I have a brand-new purple cast, which greatly reduces my fear that I’m going to screw something up bumping into something or falling.

My cool new purple cast.

• I’m not so darn tired anymore. Even on Monday, which I thought would be my first “normal” day post-surgery, I ended up napping the entire afternoon. This, from the girl who couldn’t even nap during the regular afternoon siesta while studying abroad in Italy. Napping Amy=sick Amy. But now, I’m not only staying awake all day, I’m getting antsy, which brings me to my final indicator of better health…
• In addition to short walks through my neighborhood, I’m going to start doing my hip-strengthening lineup a total of once a day. I have the thumbs-up from my doctor on this, as I’ve promised to leave enough time between them–a set of lunges here, a few squats there–to make sure I don’t get sweaty. As if I needed any more reason to get back to my routine with these, who did I see on the way out of my hand surgeon’s office on Tuesday but Beefcake Brad, the sports physical therapist I’d been seeing once a week for hip and ankle issues. I knew his office was just down the hall from my surgeon’s, but it was still a surprise to almost literally run into him after my appointment. I’m taking it as a sign from the sports injury gods to get back to work, at least to the extent that I can. Here’s the lineup I’ll do every day this week:

3X10 Cook hip lifts

3X10 clamshells with a resistance band (shown here, along with lots of other interesting-looking running-specific exercises)

3X10 deep squats

3X10 single-leg squats

“Monster walks” with two resistance bands.

Lateral lunges, backwards lunges and leg curls with a towel placed beneath the working foot.

In other getting-back-to-normal news, I’ve set a new post-recovery running goal: a fast 5K, maybe the Earth Day 5K in Silver Spring on April 18. I’m not 100 percent counting myself out for the the Blue Ridge Parkway Half-Marathon the following weekend; I’m just developing a fun and do-able Plan B in case I don’t get enough time to train for it.

Better yet, I got a respite from my convalescence when I met my running buddies for a post-run happy hour at our favorite spot, a wine bar called Adega. Not only did I have a great time there, there was a sweet get well-card from the whole gang waiting for me when I checked my mail back home. If I can’t run, knowing my running buddies are thinking about me is the next best thing.

It’s hard to believe that just three weeks ago, I was writing a post about how I found motivation from the idea that I was fit enough to not only enjoy hours upon hours of fresh powder skiing, but to handle shoveling out an entire ski lift to earn my turns.

Almost a week after surgery on Tuesday to fix my broken wrist and stabilize it using a titanium plate, I am starting to feel more like myself again. I’m down to one or two Percocets a day, if that, and I’m generally getting back to normal.

But it’s a new normal, albeit a temporary one. As I focus on physical challenges like making a fist with my right hand (which I can *totally* already do, placing me squarely ahead of where my doctor thought I’d be at this point), and celebrate the fact that I’m letting my body rest rather than getting it moving, I’ve found I need some reminders of the hard-skiing, marathon-running, Chesapeake Bay-swimming rock star I normally fancy myself. That brings me to the talismans of hope with which I’ve started to surround myself.

First, a word about talismans. When I looked up the dictionary definition of talisman to find out how to pluralize it (talismen?), I found it perfectly describes my little collection of feel-good items: “an object held to act as a charm to avert evil and bring good fortune,” or “something producing apparently magical or miraculous effects.”  Just what I need!

It started with my lucky skier socks on the day of the surgery, which I wore until I had to trade them for the hospital’s “pillow paws,” which were also pretty comfy.

It continues with my new favorite shirt: The one I bought at Mount Baker after skiing the you-know-what out of that resort during a visit out West in 2007. The shirt says, “Mount Baker rocks.” But I’m using it more as a reminder that I rock.

You can't tell in this picture, but behind the SpongeBob-esque contraption helping to immobilize my arm, I'm wearing a skiing shirt.

I have so many T-shirts from road races in open water swims, I have little choice but to wear them to bed on a regular basis. But over the past week, I’ve taken a certain pride in each shirt, relishing memories of actually running the Broad Street Run, the Earth Day 5K, the Run for the Pies 5K in Jacksonville.

My drawer full of race T-shirts.

I even wash down my pills with water sipped from my Gate River Run glass.

All these things do something I desperately need in order to heal: They remind me that I’m tough, and that I’ve conquered challenges in the past. The challenge I’m facing now is vastly different from these athletic pursuits, but the mental toughness and determination I’ll need to apply to it is the same.

I’m staying in touch with “normal me” through my actions, too. I’ve met all my deadlines since first breaking my arm, and I’m proud to share that this story about the Lamond Riggs neighborhood, which I reported, wrote, and took pictures for, was published over the weekend. Tomorrow, I’ll celebrate my first post-op doctor visit–and my one-week anniversary of being done with surgery–by meeting with my running buddies at Pacers Silver Spring for a post-run happy hour. I’ll have to skip the run, but that doesn’t mean I have to skip the happy!

Wish me luck at the doctor tomorrow!