The Desert of My Dreams

I’m a bit astonished that it has been over two months since my last post but it really should be no surprise to me since I’ve had little to say about my leg injury or my weight loss (and that’s really all that’s consumed my personal life the past few months). It feels like I haven’t had much progress in either area. I’ve been feeling very much like a little hamster on a hamster wheel but sometimes that in itself is progress.

I finished physical therapy earlier this month. Even though I was still having the same symptoms in my left leg (and sometimes in my right leg), my PT didn’t think there was much more that they could do for me in terms of physical therapy. He felt that the best thing to do right now would be to continue doing my stretches and PT exercises at home. He gave me the OK to get back to doing whatever I want exercise-wise and to start running again. He also watched me run and felt some adjustments to my gait might help with the pain. I have a tendency to push off and land on my toes and ideally I should be landing on my heel.

I’ve been running the past couple of weeks, trying hard to adjust my gait and to stick to soft surfaces. I also picked up some orthotics that a a podiatrist recommended. For now, I’m going to try to limit my running to 2 – 3 times a week and only for about an hour. I still have a sharp tight pain in my left thigh but it seems worst during the first mile/mile and a half of a run. After that, the pain subsides and it just feels a bit sore. I’ve been making sure to stretch my legs pretty well before and after runs, along with icing my leg after a run and massaging my leg with a foam roller everyday. Doing all of those things has certainly helped with the pain when I’m not exercising but it does not seem to be preventing the pain when I’m running. My gut feeling right now is that my back wasn’t the cause of my symptoms but that a tight IT band might be the real culprit. I haven’t had any back pain since I started running and it seems like the only time I had severe back pain was usually after some sort of medical appointment (usually after something a doctor, chiro, or PT would make me do).

It has been really amazing to get back to running. Nothing else makes me feel so physically empowered and capable. I’ve really missed that feeling most of this past year.

Despite my excitement about running, I can’t help but feel angry and disappointed that I’ve been so unsuccessful in getting my leg treated. I feel like much of the past year has been wasted. Wasted seeing specialists. Wasted getting my hopes up. Wasted being frustrated. Wasted trying this or that treatment. Wasted going to physical therapy. Wasted not getting a real solution. Wasted not losing weight.

Given how much time and effort I’ve spent in 2009 trying to get this issue resolved, I’ve decided to give up on it for now and learn to live with it. Trying to get this injury treated really slowed down my weight loss – I didn’t have as much time to exercise or prepare food, was limited in the exercises that I could do, and felt pretty bad about the whole situation. I really could use a break right now from medical treatments (especially unsuccessful ones) and I think not having to worry about all of that will help kickstart my weight loss once again. I also feel that I haven’t had very much luck getting my injury treated simply because I’m fat and don’t look athletic. I think most doctors and specialists I saw didn’t take me very seriously and didn’t understand how important it was for me to get back to running as soon as possible. I’m hoping that my leg will heal itself eventually but that if it doesn’t that I will be thin enough at some point to get proper medical attention.

When it comes to my weight, I’ve been maintaining it at around the 68 – 70 pound mark. I was really hoping that I’d get to 80 pounds by the end of the year but that just didn’t happen. As I feared when I joined Weight Watchers a few months ago, I really couldn’t stick to it. Their program (which is a diet, regardless of what they say) was just too restrictive. I know people can lose weight doing Weight Watchers and I really envy those people who can stick to a plan and steadily lose a pound or two every week. But for whatever reason, I’m not wired that way and I seem to take a lot of missteps before I eventually move forward.

I’m now back to writing down my food in a paper food journal, monitoring my appetite, and trying to only eat when I’m truly hungry. I was really hoping that I could get to 90 or 100 pounds by the time I turned 30. Right now, I think I’d be happy with 75 or 80.

And that’s why losing weight (naturally) is so fucking incredibly hard. It takes a lot of time and energy. It takes months of losing and gaining the same five pounds. It takes a lot of readjusting and shifting. What worked for me three years ago, may not work for me today. I wish it was faster, mostly because I’m tired of having worked so hard and come so far and yet not being there yet. Even though I do sometimes feel like a little hamster on her little hamster wheel, I have to remind me myself that just being on the wheel is better than not being on it. I’ve managed to maintain my weight loss for three years. I exercise several times a week. I eat mostly healthy food. I’ve managed to lose and maintain an amount of weight that most people can’t lose or maintain. I’m down 4 – 5 sizes. I’m the lowest weight I’ve ever been as an adult.

And for now that’s something to be proud of.

A friend of mine emailed me this morning wondering how I could possibly not have updated my blog since May 15th?!? She even started to wonder if her Blackberry had it wrong.

Her Blackberry didn’t have it wrong – I just haven’t had much to say lately. I wake up, I weigh myself, I get frustrated when my weight hasn’t gone down, I do stretches that are supposed to help my injury, I go to work, I attempt to workout given the limitations of my injury, I see specialists about my injury, I get frustrated about the lack of progress in the healing of my injury, I read vampire novels, I go to bed. And then I repeat the whole cycle the next day.

Being injured has sucked. I don’t have a clear diagnosis of what is really wrong with me – I have some sciatica-like symptoms in my left thigh. I have a constant tingling in my thigh, which most of the time I don’t even think about. When I do go running, I have a fairly severe pulling pain in my thigh and sometimes in my butt. Depending on who you ask, this pain might be a pinched nerve due to tightness in my glutes and other muscles in my butt (did you know that you butt does a lot of work when you’re running or hiking?). Or it might be a herniated disk that is inflaming/pinching the nerve. Or it might be a compensation injury due to an imbalance in my form. I also sometimes have pain in my lower back or tail bone but that seems to be more sporadic.

It is frustrating because I’ve been dealing with this injury since February. I’ve seen my doctor, a physical therapist, and a chiropractor. We’ve tried a bunch of different things and so far nothing has healed my leg. I’m trying to stay positive about the chiropractor since I only started treatment with him a couple of weeks ago. If that doesn’t work, I’m supposed to see yet another specialist (I can’t remember the technical medical term but I believe it is a doctor who treats the back exclusively).

This injury has been a pretty major setback for me. I’m angry, disappointed, frustrated, and generally feeling helpless and like a total failure. It is one thing to get injured when you’re skinny. It is something else to get injured when you’re trying to lose weight. I’m actually surprised with how hard I’ve taken it. I knew I was starting to love running but I didn’t realize just how much it meant to me. Not only did it enable me to stay on track with my weight loss goals, I just really enjoyed it. Running makes me feel like I’m an athlete – it makes me feel like I can do the impossible. Sure, I’m pretty slow and I can’t run that far (4 – 5 miles is the longest distance I’ve run) but it still feels like I’m doing something I’m not supposed to be able to do at my size right now. Getting on the elliptical doesn’t excite me or give me the same feelings of self-worth that running does. Running helped me sort through the various emotional and mental junk floating around my mind. For whatever reason, I can’t seem to get the same sort of clarity from any other exercise I’ve tried.

I’ve been trying to see the silver lining to my current situation but that has been a struggle. I keep reminding myself that I’ve come a long way and accomplished something that most people can’t do. I’m at the lowest weight I’ve been in 11 years. And despite my injury, I’ve still managed to maintain my weight loss. All of those are very positive things but I can’t help but think that they’re excuses. At the end of the day, I’m left with overwhelming feelings of failure, anger, and disappointment.

And that’s really why I haven’t been blogging – nobody wants to read a whiny angry post.

In more positive (but unrelated) news, I just moved to a new apartment this weekend. I LOVE the new place so far (despite having a bunch of maintenance issues).

I have a lot to be grateful for in my life right now – I’m just struggling to see past this setback.

I don’t have much to report about my life so I figured a fitness update was in order (and there really isn’t much else going on):

• When I increased the intensity of my running workouts a couple of months ago, I started noticing a sharp pain in my left thigh. The pain would usually only occur when I was running and go away after I stopped running. At first, I thought it was because I needed to get some new running shoes but my new shoes didn’t help. I then figured it was just normal soreness from challenging my body so I ignored it. The pain got so bad last week that it started lingering for a few hours after my running workouts. I decided that this couldn’t be normal so I took a break from running for a week hoping that it would heal on its own. When the pain didn’t go away after a week’s rest, I went and saw my doctor. It turns out that I have sciatica. The good news is that my doctor doesn’t think it is back/disc related and she seemed pretty optimistic that I’ll be back to my normal running workouts in a few weeks. From my understanding, it sounds like the cause of the problem might be lack of proper stretching. The muscles around my sciatic nerve are tight (which apparently happens when you exercise) so they’re causing pressure on the nerve. For now, I’m taking a week off from anything that triggers the pain – running, walking, hiking, and bike riding. I can still exercise but my options have been pretty limited this week – elliptical (not the crossramp kind since that also triggers the pain), swimming, and resistance training. I’m also supposed to take Advil 3 times a day (to alleviate the inflammation) and do the piriformis stretch. That stretch, by the way, is literally a pain in the ass – although it doesn’t seem as hard to do now as it did when I first tried doing it Monday night. Starting next week, I can get back to running (YAY) but I have to take it slow – I’m only supposed to do half of my usual workout for the first week or so. If the pain doesn’t go away after a few weeks, I have to go back to see my doctor for more intense treatment. I’m hoping that it’ll heal up sooner rather than later.
• I’m back to taking swim lessons but with a new instructor. I’ve only had two lessons so far but I really like my new instructor. She seems to really know how to work with adults and I’m seeing a huge improvement in my skills. Her availability seems pretty limited, though, so I’m hoping I can continue to work with her over the spring and summer. I was started to get really down about my swimming skills – like I’m never going to get any better because I didn’t learn as a kid. It’s nice to be excited about swimming, again. And its been great timing since I can’t run right now.
• After the whole sciatica thing, I started thinking that I really need to learn more about running. For the most part, I feel like I’ve been running blind. I knew enough to find a running plan online so that I could actually slowly progress to running a 5K and I knew enough to go to a running store and get proper running shoes for my feet but other than that, I really don’t know much else about it. I decided to buy a running book so that I could learn more about proper training and stretching. I looked through a number of books at Borders but settled on this one. Even though I’m not very far into it, I’m really loving reading this book! For one thing, since I can’t run right now, it is nice to at least think about running. The book is really positive and very encouraging. I looked at other books and some of them seemed to have a condescending tone – like spending a whole chapter lecturing you on how to get motivated. Umm . . . given what I’ve accomplished the past few years, I’m not sure motivation is my problem.