This week marks the five month anniversary of my ankle injury. You know - the one where I spent a week in Peru repairing a house back in October and instead of getting hurt there, waited until I was getting off the shuttle back at the Denver Airport to fall and badly sprain it.
I'd never really been injured before that. I've never had stitches, never broken a bone, never spent any time in a hospital for anything. I've lived a charmed life. But I learned a thing or two from being injured for a few months - first, that injuries take forever to heal and second, the best time to break through your comfort zone is right after you've recovered from an injury.
Two things to know - I hate being still and I'm not very patient. It's probably undiagnosed adult ADD. I have the attention span of a kitten most of the time, and am about as still as one too.
Speaking of kittens, this is funny. Watch it.
See what I mean? ADD.
Anyway, I was supposed to wear a brace for 6-8 weeks after I sprained my ankle. I wore mine for 3 weeks and 4 days. Close enough. For someone who can't sit or stand still for more than 10 minutes at a time, there was nothing more frustrating than not being able to move without pain week after week after week.
I'm not particularly athletic, meaning you would never be able to tell by looking at me that I love working out but I do. I love to run, swim, bike (sometimes I put them all together and even do a triathlon), walk, hike, and eat ice cream. The ice cream is what motivates me to do the other things. So having a sprained ankle for months meant no running, no swimming, no hiking, no walking, etc. That left me with biking (my least favorite of my favorite physical activities) and eating ice cream.
I wanted to be healed way faster than my body was willing to be. I remember getting on an elliptical six weeks after the injury and lasting for 30 seconds before having to switch to a stationary bike. Lame. Literally. Then another four weeks after that trying to lightly jog and gasping in pain after a minute and then being barely able to even walk 20 minutes on a treadmill. I really thought I was never going to be ok again.
But four weeks ago, four months after the injury, I tried again. And this time, my foot felt stronger and ready. The rest of my body had some catching up to do - it turns out, eating ice cream is not the same as running when it comes to building physical endurance. My body had no idea that it ever knew how to run and was shocked when I tried to make it do so again.
The beautiful thing, though, about starting over is that it gives you a chance to really start over. I had been in the same place with my running for years. The same pace, the same distance, the same amount of time I could go before I thought I was going to die. But now in starting over, after just four weeks of getting back into it, I'm forcing myself to go faster and farther than I did before. And you know what? I'm surprising mysef in the process. Because my body forgot that it ever knew how to run in the first place, I can now teach it to run better. Whatever psychological barriers I had leading up to my injury aren't factoring in now that I'm working from a clean slate.
So I can look back on last fall, being sidelined and forced to be still for a season, and be grateful for it now because, in the end, it's making me better at what I love to do.
It's also been four weeks now since my heart was broken. Again, I'm discovering that this takes longer to heal than I want it to. I've tried taking some tentative steps forward a couple of times over the last few weeks only to discover that it's way too painful still, and probably will be for awhile. That's ok. I've learned from my ankle that injuries aren't the end of the world and healing does come with time. And I'm hopeful that in a few months, I'll be able to really start over for real with my heart too, and push it out of its normal comfort zone and teach it how to be better. It will be shocked when I try to make it feel something again, I'm sure, but by then, it will be more of the heart I want it to be.
In the meantime, there's always ice cream. And maybe I should get a kitten.
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