run this amazing day

For our fifth wedding anniversary slash Christmas slash we never buy each other presents for holidays anyway so whatever, the poet let me buy bought me a fancy new Garmin. Chop wood and carry water , is how I loosely tied it into our anniversary celebration.  And I'll chalk it up to whatever ironies there are in the world that the day I unboxed it and ran with it for the first time was the last time I would run - or really, exist - without pain, for a while. I've had to deal with some rather unpleasant work stress these last few months on top of everything else that has been going on with my body.  It was about a month ago when I went out one morning for a short & easy run to shake off the dry needling I'd had done the day before.  Within two minutes, my HR was through the roof.  I stopped and adjusted (spat on) my heart rate monitor, then kept jogging as lightly and easily as I could, and after a few more minutes it was in a range I generally only see in the las

I bounced back from the second round of prolotherapy much more quickly than the first.  By the time I was 48 hours out, I was starting to feel okay, although still very sore and fragile around the joint.  I tentatively did a pretty short jog and swim on Wednesday afternoon/evening and both went better than I expected (i.e. I didn't turn around or get out after three minutes).   My hip on that side has been locking up on and off over the last few weeks and with that, I think I am starting to finally understand how the various issues I've had all over my body are related to this central instability.  Nothing near or around my right hip was touched when I had the second round, but the next two days my TFL and piriformis flared up, hard.  I believe that what's happening is that when the joint is particularly unstable, those hip stabilizers are working twice as hard to try and provide stability around the loose joint.  As the week went out and my SI joint started to calm down

I had a second round of prolotherapy done yesterday. Backing up.  The week after the first round was horrible (I'm a walking commercial for this treatment not to mention lifestyle, I know).  I had read plenty of cases where an athlete was treated and then happily back at her life a few days later and that did not happen to me.  I slept like crap the first 3-4 nights because I couldn't lay on my back and I couldn't turn over and I couldn't lay on any one side too long and at some point Graham stretched and poked me in the injection site and I woke the entire house up shrieking.  I don't remember when exactly but at some point I was in so much pain that I stood in the shower letting tears leak out of my face, convinced that I would never swim/bike/run or even walk/stand/sit again.  I spent a lot of time in January trying stay reasonable and calm and not fall off the ledge but failed a couple of times, and that was one. I came through Heather's office & hea

I hate to call this an update, because, well, update  reminds me that I haven't been taking time to be in this space for a while.  Last summer, when everything in life was crazy, I kept on posting because I like the overly-public journal that I've created here with all my babbling and selfies and random quotes over the last six years.  It's become part of how I process; that's the only reason I'm still writing, because it's important to me and not for anyone else.  And I've had an inkling that I wanted to sit down and record what was going on as I've worked through this mess but then there would be another low and I'd be spitting fuck it  to anyone that would listen and suddenly seven weeks has gone by and it's all kind of a blur. January.  As a whole: a wash.  After the first of who-knows-how-many-by-now rounds of aggressive dry needling and yank-thunk, I got the okay to try an easy run.  I think I did forty minutes.  Two or three days later