Sunday, September 16, 2012

If Pain is a Sign of Weakness Leaving the Body ...

... then I must be pretty strong.

Even though I'm only doing a combination walk/jog and at a slow pace, I've been hurting the last few days out.  I didn't mention anything because I was hoping it was nothing big and I'd be able to work it out, especially since I now had good running shoes (and then of course there's the Marine thing of not wanting to admit weakness).  My shins have been hurting and it's been difficult to pick my feet up off the ground at the jog, so it was really more of dragging my feet along at a shuffle. I decided I wasn't going to do my workout on this crappy road I live on and figured it I went out to the local track, my legs would thank me.

They didn't.


I started off yesterday with the walk and was fine, but as soon as I hit the jogging stride, the pain in my shins hit me.  This week I'm supposed to walk 3 min/jog 2 min, and I figured I could endure the pain for a measly 2 min at a time, so I pressed on.  By the time I got done with the 30 min workout, I was a hurting puppy.  I walked a full 1/4 mile loop around the track when I finished to cool down, stretched my legs a bit, then drove the 5 miles home.

The pain in my shins was excruciating as soon as I exited the car.  I have a pretty good pain tolerance, and this was enough to bring me almost to tears.  Even if this wasn't shin splints, I knew that I should take at least a day or two off , and figured if I did anything at all, maybe I'd just do a few minutes on the recumbent bike with no resistance, just to keep loosened up.  I took an aspirin and Tylenol, grabbed an ice pack and iced both shins off and on throughout the afternoon and called it good.

After keeping my legs elevated for most of a couple of hours, I got up only to get the surprise of my life -- my shins felt fine, but my right knee felt as if someone had stuck a knife in it.  What the heck?

More aspirin, more Tylenol, more ice ... nothing helped.  Anyone who knows me knows that I take about a half dozen Tylenol a year and hate to take anything stronger (can't take most meds anyway), so that should be an indicator of how much pain I was in.  I gave up on getting anything else done and went to bed early.

New problem -- getting into bed.  Yep, it was that bad, then between needing to go to the bathroom (damn that increased water intake), dog puking on the floor by my bed, and dogs needing to go potty, I was up several times within the first hour.  By that time I was in tears from the pain in my knee, so grabbed a book (and more Tylenol) to try to relax enough to get to sleep again.  I was somewhat comfortable in one position and any movement set it off again, and it was after 4:30 am the last time I looked at the clock before nodding off.

My knee felt a little better when I got up this morning, but it's still pretty painful.  I've been able to hobble around some, but tried to keep it elevated as much as possible.  Oddly, still no pain in either shin at all.  I don't get it.

All that to say that I'll be sidelined until I can figure out what's going on.  At 55 yrs old, overweight and out of shape, I really should have listened to my body better when it tried to tell me I was overdoing it.  I had absolutely no business trying to get into a jog yet, even for just a minute or two, with streets shoes, on an uneven surface full of pits and holes, with an incline to boot.  Discomfort after a workout is one thing, but pushing on through pain during the entire 30 min, regardless of how light of a workout it might seem, is just plain stupid.

So here I sit, kicking myself in the proverbial butt for letting my pride push common sense aside.  I didn't want to take a break and lose my stride, and now I don't have a choice, at least for a while.  I've learned a valuable lesson that I hope never to repeat.

~ Marie Anne


2 comments:

  1. So sorry to hear about your painful mishap! Hope you heal fast!

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  2. Feel better soon! Hope your knee is nothing serious.

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