One of my main physical activities is running.
I first got involved in it while still living in Fort Saint John at the end of the 1980s.
This continued when we moved to a small town on the west coast of Canada, and I've been at it ever since. That adds up to about thirty-years' worth.
There have been a few bumps over the years that forced temporary stoppages, but recently it's been the worst.
I've had a cranky knee since the middle of 2014. It usually behaves, and often I can't tell my bad knee from the good one. On occasion, it gives me a bit of a twinge, and I take a couple of weeks off to settle things back down.
The most recent twinge popped up for no reason at all just before Christmas a little over a year ago. I had gone to bed absolutely dandy, and awoke with my knee singing me a tale of woe.
If that happened on a normal day I would have shut down anything that could have aggravated the situation. The problem on that day was that I was scheduled to get myself into the big city to test for a Gracie Jiu-Jitsu Brown Belt. I pushed on.
By the end of my evaluation, my knee was definitely done, and I limped off to catch the first of several buses required to get me to the ferry home.
I was off of running until March. We were in Palm Springs by then, and I did a respectable number of delightful desert runs. The month after that we were back home, and I did about a half dozen neighbourhood runs.
My knee then decided to go bad again. It earned itself another good, long healing period, and then I started with a self-designed rehab program.
I ran every day, but my first runs were only a couple of hundred meters in length. Every 8 days I'd bump it up by a hair. Everything went very well, and I stuck to my slow-buildup system.
Every 8 days the distance would go up by half a mile. Once I'd finished my 8 days doing 3 miles I declared myself officially fixed. This had taken 48 days in all.
Daily runs continued, with distances in the 5-8km range, as the mood took me. After a few months, I stopped worrying about my leg at all.
So then, of course, a sleep injury to my ankle shut me down again. I made a few attempts to keep going, but it was clear that damage was being done, and so prudence called another complete halt.
While healing from that, another unrelated sleep injury prolonged the downtime. This time it was to the hip on the side which had been fine all along.
Altogether the running halt was three months or perhaps a bit more.
Yesterday, I did the first part of my latest slow-increase rehab. The distance was a hearty half of a mile, after which I sat about waiting for some bloody body part to announce its lack of cooperation. None did.
Therefore, I was out doing another half mile today, and will hopefully keep this up until 8 days have passed. Then the distance will grow up to a full mile, and keep growing over time.
The injury list went knee, knee, ankle, hip; all with no cause other than sleeping funny. This doesn't happen to young people.
