Still walking with pain — more than before even, and still have a very very slight limp — less than before. Mostly. Ugh.
Talked to a climber-personal trainer friend (via text since we are on opposite sides of the globe) to ask why my pain/limp hasn’t gone away yet. He thought that four months was maybe a bit aggressive to be totally back to normal, but also was like, “unfortunately, sporadic pain is probably to be expected at this point.”
However, I’m not really having “sporadic” pain — more like all the time. 😦
I told him that I was doing my exercises almost every day, to which he replied, “are you doing the same exercises over and over?” Me: “yes, though I’m adding weight.” Him: “you need to switch things up!” He also recommended that I try to do what he called “dynamic” exercises. That is, exercises that operate in all three dimensions. Also, exercises that do strength and balance at the same time.
So I’m trying to do that, though it’s kind of hard to make up a lot of things. I have started doing a lot more lunches — holding a 10kg plate in front of me and twisting to the side as I do down on into the lunch. I do the same, though with a 5kg weight, on a bosu ball which is HARD. I’m also making up sequences involving lunges that involve moving weight across my body as I stand on one leg. And finally, I’ve returned to assisted pistol squats on my bad leg. (And non-assisted on the good side.)
In any case, I can feel that I’m getting WAY stronger from this, particularly in my quads, hamstrings, and glutes.
But the pain remains, and I think that one issue was that I thought that trying some jumping would help with strength, and all that it really did was damage muscles. Kind of mad at myself about this, but what can I do. I hate thought that as of late, I’ve been leaving the gym with more pain than I had going in.
I’m going away for four days, and will be able to do only minimal exercises while away. But will be walking a ton. I’m hoping that this actually helps with the pain — by not doing such strenuous exercises.
As for my days without any pain two weeks ago, in all seriousness, the lack of pain was directly proportional to my fever, which is just bizarre. But as my fever started to go down, the pain started to come back. I have no other explanation. Just weird.
Okay, that is it for this week. Lesson learned: no jumping — and if I start to feel better, don’t do things that are going to put too much more stress on the thing. Painful to feel like I’m hindering my own progress.
The good news — I guess — is that on my weekend trip, I was able to walk around a somewhat treacherous city for walking for hours at a time, and it didn’t feel too bad. I walked up 272 rather steep steps (as pictured), which I am going to admit, was not the most fun. 1/3 because of pain, 1/3 because I was scared coming down that I was going to topple over because the stairs were so steep, and 1/3 because of the number of monkeys playing around on the stairs.
Something both terrifying and exciting: on my way to my new office, there is a shortcut that saves a lot of time but that has a drainage canal that you have to step over that is rather treacherous with my leg. The first day I looked at it and was like, “no way,” and walked an extra five minutes to go around it. But then on Monday I decided to try it — and I did it. Going back across it at the end of the day was worse, because there is a fairly steep hill, and it was hard to hold myself back from going down it quickly. But, I’m doing it. Today was even easier, naturally.
In other news, I went to a regional bouldering competition here — to watch! Watching it made me feel like that is soooo far away for me. Not only landing, but leg strength too. It made me wonder if it will take until May, when I can return to my regular climbing gym. But then I realize that that is nearly four months away (May 15) — that’s way more time than the thing has even been broken. Surely I will get to return at least with my shoes broken in, no?
I Broke My Leg Bouldering 