Injuries feel like…shin.

My injury is in my shin.  It feels like shin.  As opposed to a less-nice word spelled with almost the same letters.

Ah, man, you guys!  Look at the partial post I had saved in draft for you yesterday:

I am so grateful.

Today my knee wasn’t giving me any of the usual crap, and so I felt good enough to actually do some exercise for the first time in about a week.  I went with something low-impact but heart-rate spiking, and pounded out 30 minutes of a steep incline on our elliptical while Shakira was blasted into my ears.  It’s physically impossible to go slowly while listening to Latino pop.

I was literally dripping sweat after this (man, a week of inactivity can do that to a person), but it felt sooo good!

Today’s workout was brought to you courtesy of a lovely knee brace I’ve christened Charles. I have been advised to wear the brace when I exercise in order to prevent furthering my runner’s knee. I love Charles; so far I’ve had almost NO pain today!

And so you can tell how awesome my mood was yesterday.  Today, however, was a different story:

For one thing, I believe I somehow “slept on my knee wrong” last night and therefore when I woke up I was already sore.  It felt like a productive sore, though; as in, I just busted my butt on the elliptical after a week of inactivity and I’m getting stronger because of that, not as in, Oh, that was stupid, why did I exercise yesterday, my shin is freaking broken!

But that’s certainly what it feels like today.

I did cry a bit; I can’t even really walk at the moment.  Mother Dearest and I have turned our suspects from runner’s knee to shin splints, or a stress fracture.  The Emergency Room kind of freaks me out, but we’ve pledged to get me to the doctor as soon as possible tomorrow.  I’m really doubting my ability to even hobble between my classes tomorrow…

And I’m confined to total inactivity now; there’s very little exercises you can do that don’t involve your legs whatsoever.  To think about doing things even so low-impact as biking or swimming makes my cringe right now.  This is a problem, because, especially in the winter when my mood tends to plummet because of a lack of natural sunshine, I tend to rely a lot on exercise for mah endorphin production and sanity.  That, and chocolate.  So now that I can’t even dink around on Wii Fit, much less run, I’ve been lounging around the house like a lazy bum in a cloud of despondency.

For some reason I can’t help feeling like this injury is all my fault.  I somehow ran wrong; I went about recovering wrong; I worked out on the elliptical yesterday when I should have given myself more rest.  Wrong.  I guilt-tripped my parents into paying for another 5k this weekend that it doesn’t look like I’ll be participating in.  Wrong.  I just feel an incredible amount of guilt and frustration at this unexpected injury–who would have thought that working hard to get faster would end up stopping me from moving at all?

I know I should be looking on the positive side of things: after all, I definitely could be in worse pain, and my injury will (probably…) heal, while there are plenty of people who are never able to run because of a chronic injury or a physical disability.  I should be grateful that, sometime in the future, I will most likely have the ability to run again, and that we are financially sound enough to sign up for things like 5ks every month, even if I miss out on one.  Running is just one facet of my life, and there are so many other things I have to be grateful for.  I am grateful for all these things; but for now I just need to vent!!

But don’t worry, you guys.  I’ve made myself a breakfast cookie for tomorrow. 😉 I’ll be back on the blogosphere with another update then as well; wish me luck!

Wishing you good health and happiness this holiday season,

The Girl in the Orange