I literally just hopped off the treadmill from my run. I'm going to be honest up front, I run slower than turtles through molasses in the dead of winter in New England. However, I do run. I enjoy running. That wasn't always the case. But, I digress.
I decided to skip what I had planned to write about this week to write about going for a run today. As a fitness professional, it probably doesn't surprise you that I go for runs. (Some runners would call them jogs, but I figure if they make it hard to breath, cover me in sweat, and give me jelly legs, they are runs.)
Here's the thing though. In January of 2020, just weeks before the pandemic broke out, I severely injured my ankle. I don't have health insurance, so multiple doctors visits were out of the question. I got it x rayed to make sure there were no fractures/breaks, and the ER doc reset it, because I had managed to dislocate several joints. Yes, there are multiple joints in your ankle and foot. By October of 2020 it still hadn't healed up. It was still swollen, it was still bruised. It still hurt pretty much nonstop. Obviously I had rested it quite a bit, I mean I was on lock down and couldn't exactly do much. I was doing daily walks of maybe a mile, but that isn't really much.
Well, I was goofing around on Halloween. It's kind of a big deal in my house. Not only is it a super important holiday that hubby and I had celebrated prior to meeting each other, it is also our anniversary. Full disclosure, an excessive amount of Jack Daniels was involved. I tried to jump over something I shouldn't have, and I landed wrong. Really, really, wrong. Within seconds of landing my ankle was swollen and black. I could walk on it, so using the ER doctor's logic it wasn't broken. I dug through my closet and found my air cast for it. (I have casts and splints for a lot of injuries, but I'll save that for another blog.)
I wore my air cast, wrapped it, and took care of it. Within a few weeks, it was finally starting to heal. The swelling that hadn't gone down in 10 months was gone, the bruising was gone. I had full range of motion back in my ankle. I'm fairly certain that there were several dislocations remaining after the January ER visit and my drunken shenanigans fixed them.
Oh, but the whole reason I am writing today. There were times in the last one year and one month, that I had thought about giving up on ever running again. I couldn't even do yoga anymore, how was I going to go for runs? I focused all my energy on strength training during my injured time, instead of a more balanced approach. Today, I went for my fifth run since being injured. I succeeded at walk/running 1.5 miles. It's not the 5 k was running twice a week before my injury, but it's better than barely being able to complete a mile.
I refuse to be one of those people that say that if you put your mind to it, anything is possible. Because I know that's not the reality. Again, I'll get into that more in another post.
For now, try and keep your head and heart up. The world needs positive people with love and kindness in their hearts.
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I love you all,
Kris