Not Listening...Again

There have been times when I didn't listen to my body and paid the price.  Like when I was running my final 5K run and my knee was hurting so bad I had to walk some of it but I kept on pressing on and finished it.  Then found out it was torn cartilage and needed surgery to repair and that knee has never been the same.  And in 2012 while I was extremely stressed out and desperately needed a rest but just kept plugging along, full time work, raising kids and going to college; stress exacerbated by a car needing repair which I didn't have money for, and being forced to take statistics class which was the bane of my existence!  I ended up going to the walk-in clinic on Thanksgiving Day that year and was diagnosed with shingles.  The staff who treated me couldn't believe someone younger than 50 had shingles.  "You must be under an extreme amount of stress to have gotten shingles at your age" they told me.  UGH. 
Today I seriously did not want to exercise.  The past few days I have been feeling like I'm coming down with a cold, sore throat, slightly stuffy nose, eyes burning and watering...but I have this part of me that always thinks if I do more work now I will be able to relax later, so I started walking around and eventually when I warmed up a little bit the music did make me feel good and I was getting a pretty good workout in walking around my apartment.  It reached a high point when Camila Cabello's "Liar" played near the end of my workout.  I really like this song and during my paces I stopped to dance for a minute, stepping in a sort of cha-cha fashion to the music and as soon as my right leg went down there was a large unpleasant snap just above my right hip.  Ouch!  I don't think it is going to be a major thing because I am walking without a limp and can bear weight on it etc, but it will be sore for a while.  How the hell did I get so old and out of shape so fast?  At my sister's wedding in 1998 I also hurt that same hip dancing.  That was a really bad one that had me limping for months and I was too ashamed of being overweight so I didn't get it checked out.  I was only 25 then but that was also a point of my life where depression really consumed me so the fact that I didn't have it checked out back then is probably going to come back to bite me in the butt eventually.  If things keep going on this way I may start seeing my chiropractor more frequently to make sure my spine stays in alignment.  Though I am thinking this is more due to muscle weaknesses that are causing misalignment or misuse of certain parts of my body. 
I have done 125 minutes of the 150 mintues of cardio for the weekly goal, so I only need 25 more for the week.  I may have to do the bike to meet those, I don't want to agrivate any of my hurting parts.  UGH.  I feel so lame that I can't move without injuring myself these days.  I really need to figure out how to prevent these sorts of things going forward.  I do think that the right yoga program could probably do a world of good for me, I a little nervous to try it yet since my ankle problem started when I was doing yoga consistently and I could tell some of the things I was doing (lunges, downward dog) were irritating my ankle. 
It really makes me understand how some elderly people just give up and let life happen to their body, if there's a chance of doing damage to yourself or causing pain, what's to make you want to do it?  It also reminds me how crucial it is to take action now before more weaknesses crop up and wreak havoc on my body. 
I do think I may take the day off tomorrow, or at the very least I may do some gentle stretching.  While a good challenge can motivate me, there's another part of me that dreads being boxed into one thing (cardio), it makes me want to do other things.  But, as I have said, there is a way to make yoga into a cardio session, and weight lifting too.  Right now I think I should be wiser and listen to my body when it tells me it really doesn't want me to do something!

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