An overdue update.

 

 "You haven't written in your blog for ages," said Shaun, my personal trainer. "I thought you'd be writing about your gym challenge, or your rowing, at least."

I thought about it. "I guess I just assume my readers are too used to my posts veering from "yay motivated!" to "urgh, failure again!" over and over. Do I have anything new to say?"

So. The long and short of it is that after a year+ of battling plantar fasciitis, I started running again and promptly got a knee sprain in early December 2016 that didn't heal well, turned into patella inflammation, and continues to take fucking FOREVER to heal. I have made great progress the last few months, and am hesitantly, carefully starting to do some very short, very slow running intervals on a treadmill. But it's early days, and I don't get to do what 'normal' people seem to do when they get injured - take a few weeks out, then just push on through the pain straight back into whatever training they were doing beforehand. That's not my journey, not my path, and any amount of getting wound up by everyone else's super-easy injury recovery will not change that. 

My weight was increasing; I couldn't keep going the way I was. Instead, at the beginning of the year Shaun and I talked, and agreed I would continue my twice-weekly sessions with him, and we would work on 'things that don't involve the knees'. He wrote up a few programmes, had a good ol' think, and sought out some new kit in the gym he hadn't used before, that could potentially be of use. And so the year began. He challenges me with something different every single session, and I genuinely appreciate all the work he puts in for me. (I might say otherwise during the sessions, haha....)

The injured knee meant I couldn't use any of the cardio equipment in the gym (no treadmill, no cross-trainer, no rower, no stepper (yay), and only very, very gently warming up on the stationary bike). So we tried out the SkiErg, this unloved bit of tricep-murdering heart-rate-soaring erg kit tucked away in the corner of the gym. And so began a love-hate relationship to be passed down through generations. I slowly started getting a bit of fitness back, as my times began to improve. I wasn't setting the world alight, but I was working hard. And in between SkiErg workouts, I was bench pressing more than I'd ever pressed before, I was increasing my lat pulldown strength, I was working my shoulders through presses and upright rows, I was slamming battleropes over and over as sweat dripped off the end of my nose, and so on....  Over time, with the nod from a physio or other specialists I was seeing, we slowly started adding lightweight goblet squats into the programme, some simple step-ups and side-steps, and I sat down on the rowing machine.

Once I realised I could row without my knee locking or clicking, it almost seemed like a switch flicked. Shaun started incorporating rowing into the start of almost every session, be it a simple short single distance (500m, 1k, 1500m, 2k), or some mad short sprint intervals with even shorter rests... and in early July, over a kitchen chat in New Lanark with a runner, I realised I was entirely working on short bursts of power and effort, and I was doing no 'endurance' level work. Mainly because I was just working out twice a week, in personal training sessions, focussing on strength work, shorter (5 mins or so) cardio, and HIIT. So I hesitantly, carefully, started doing my own weekend "long row" as well. 4 weeks at 5km. 4 weeks at 30 mins. 4 weeks at 7.5km. 4 weeks at 10km. Soon I'll move on to 4 weeks at 1hr, and beyond.

My row sprint times were falling, my longer rows were getting faster and longer, and my confidence started to lift.

"It won't last." I told myself. BECAUSE THAT'S WHAT I DO.  "Look at what happened when your running was getting better in 2015... it didn't last. It never lasts. You fuck it all up, and get fatter. Why bother pretending otherwise? You should just order a pizza tonight, face it."

The evil mindgames I play with myself, and have done for my entire adult life, are perhaps a subject for another day - though probably not something I will ever really share in depth. All I will say here, is that I am trying extremely hard to turn my back on who deep down I 'think' I am. I have to tell myself a whole new story about who Sarah is, and more importantly, I have to believe it. This is not as simple as 'give yourself a break', or 'believe in yourself'; it's taking a lot of work. 

About 4 weeks ago I calculated there were 100 days left in 2017, and decided on a whim to start going to the gym every single day, for these 100 days. No pressure, some days will just be a treadmill incline walk and a full rehab/kneehab mobility session for example. But I've surprised myself by sticking with it. :)  I'm still getting PBs at the gym, week in, week out - my cardio fitness is improving, my strength is sky rocketing, and my weight is finally (finally) starting to go down again.... and I'm still entirely fixated on the fact that I can only run on a treadmill at walking pace for 1 minute at a time, and that my knee will not allow me to do a burpee or a squat jump.  (I utterly hate burpees and squat jumps, but apparently that's besides the point.)

And so, this is where I am. Succeeding fabulously in so many, many ways, and focussing my attention on failure. I'm working hard to turn this around, and change who I am at my core, but it's just me, alone, and in the silence of my home at night with little to distract me, deep down inside I will remind myself how stupid I am to even try. Figuring how to get that old me to fuck right off, once and for all, is the direction in which my next steps will head. With rowing. (And celebrating success without cake.) 

No, to go back to the very beginning of this post, I had nothing new to say. My current journey is a remarkably familiar story arc for this blog, and it's time to be a wee bit less predictable as I latch on firmly to my current successes, and start a whole new chapter. x