(Ms. Gertie Gluteball. Still my BFF.)
Or, to give you what I’d initially called the post , The bigass silverlining I discovered to my workouts being derailed & my life-habits being tossed into a freakin tizzy (see? too long. hence the more adult title above).
As I chatted about on this post Im no longer running the Las Vegas RocknRoll half-marathon.
I talked a little bit there about all Id learned from this random injury & decided to gift myself this post as yet another episode of navel-gazing.
I wanted to share how, for all my whining & frustration (& inability to heal this thing quickfast&inahurry), Ive been repeatedly surprised what a gift this experience has been.
Being injured was a happy reminder
Im not addicted to exercise. To spend any time with me is to hear me say
exercise is not my passion. To my mind a passion is something one wants to constantly discuss, read about, watch movies about, view tv programs about–you get the idea.
My passion is helping people & that I can do whether Im temporarily out of commission or not!
I was stunned how much extra time I had in my day. For the first time I realized
30 minutes of cardio is not 30 minutes. There’s typically at least 10 minutes of whining beforehand (I wont be doing THAT anymore) & then a minimum of ten minutes spent in front of a fan to cool down afterward (gross? yes. true? yes This misfit is a bigbig sweater). Some injured peeps might have chosen to spend the time exercising in other ways. I chose to spend it exercising my right to party not. I wrote fiction. I hung with the child. I made Barbie houses out of
empty MetRx boxes.
I generally lolled about with sporadic intervals of ass glute self-massage.
I got grumpy, I felt the grumps, I forced my way through & found the other side. To say I was pissed about
being a right angle is to put it mildly. I wanted to
run in Vegas. I was out fees for a pretty pricey event. I wanted to meet up with other bloggers heading to Vegas. I was in the position of helping people locate their workout mojo when Id have given ANYTHING to be able to workout.
And I acknowledged all of this. Loudly & in many of your collective ears. Im completely certain what prevented me from turning to destructive, frustrated behavior (hello!
New York Super Chunk Fudge!)
is the fact I embraced my emotions. I allowed myself to fully experience what I was feeling and, as a result, was able to claw my way out to the other side.I was forced to get creative & re-discover old coping mechanisms. I dont do a lot of cardio—but I do it consistently. 30 minutes a day 6 days a week. In the back of my mind I was always aware it kept my stress-level down, but I never gave it much thought until it was gone.
It was a gift to be forced to get creative and also to remember what had mitigated my stress in the past. Meditation. Reading for pleasure. Reading for education.
Writing fiction.
Writing poems. I was happily surprised, once I quit grumping, how many resources for stress-relief I had at my disposal.
I laughed. Long and hard. In the end I was forced to. I gots me an injury which afflicts hardcore runners & cyclists merely from sitting too much. I’d developed LanceArmstrongAss & hadnt been on a bikebike in decades. And really what’s more humorous than that?
*glances up from star-encircled navel to see if anyone is still here*
I know from your emails & tweets many of you are my Brothers & Sisters in Healthy Living Derailednessment (technical term).
I look to you now to chime in with the gifts youve discovered in this forced situation.
Did you find your relationships improved because you simply had more time to spend on them?
Were you able to uncover a hidden passion/new hobby that you might not have explored were you CrossFitting away your day?
Do you wish this post included a giveaway of Gertie & her partner-in-crime Betty the Booty Ball?
Please to hit us all up in the comments.
Tags: I gots an owie, learning from injury, piriformis syndrome
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