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Thursday, April 22, 2010

Wednesday

Wednesday is where it predictably starts to fall apart. This ride is not an exception....

It was STILL raining on Wednesday. It's a slower moving store than they first predicted so it's hanging around.....very worrisome as I'm really hoping for decent footing this weekend. Footing challenges on Saturday is the LAST thing I need on top of a historical tough ride that is also predicted to be in the mid-70's. (BTW - this ride is KNOWN for having a cold couple of weeks, followed by a race day that is HOT).

The rain cancelled my lesson. I really want her to be able to move around a bit so I decided go jogging with her. Seriously - I WILL NOT MELT IN THE RAIN. Neither will Farley. Am I REALLY going to use rain as an excuse to leave poor Farley cooped up for 2 whole days. Ummm....maybe. I *may* have wimped out and headed for my recliner and taken a nap :). I'm not telling and neither is Farley. After all, Aarene is insisting on me getting plenty of sleep right????

Rescheduled the lesson to Friday, which means we're going to focus on stretching and limbering her up for the ride the next day. I am somehow going to fit this lesson in around my first session of physical therapy, also on Friday....which brings us my next topic:

Sports medicine appointment for knee

Remember the knee I torqued in the wagon spoke when dismounting off the wagon 7 weeks ago? No significant improvement so off I go to the doctor. I have 2 other chronic injuries because I didn't take care of them right....so I wasn't going to make the same mistake.

See!!!???? With age comes wisdom....I think.

Very very good news. I did NOT tear my ACL or meniscus - all of which had a very good chance of happening considering the type of injury I had (torsion and hyper extension). I'm being told I'm very very lucky....Turns out all this pain is due to my IT band, which is inflamed.

So....considering I have very good insurance right now and in 18 months I will have crappy insurance (as a student), we decided to go the route that gives me the best chance of resolving this NOW with no further issues.

2 weeks of PT 3x a week, a recheck in 2 weeks and if necessary - cortisone shots (please please please let everything be ok and I can skip this....) and more PT.

I haven't gotten to the best news....

Remember the 2 "chronic" injuries I mentioned? When I told the doc that I have had chronic IT band problems in my right knee for about 10 years that I ignored/worked through he told me that even after all this time, IT WAS STILL FIXABLE. He added it to the PT work up "IT bilaterally, left worse than right". Whoo hoo!

And then.....I mentioned I had an achilles issue too from being stupid and not taking care of it when it occurred and it actually bothered me on a daily basis more than the IT band.

He said that it's stretching it a bit....but he added it to the PT script and said that it should be totally fixable to!

The achilles is the "chronic" injury that almost prevented me from finish Death Valley ride because it flared up on the last day and on the scale of 1-10 it was a 12 and I thought it was going to rupture. My right foot has much less mobility because of it - it's stiffer. Laying on my stomach to go to sleep, I have to turn this foot to the side because I can lay my foot flat against the bed. It would be WONDERFUL to have this resolved.

So my mother (Carolyn) tells me there is a lesson to be learned in all this.......I let you know when I find it.


I DID get to go to my jam and play my fiddle with my dear music friends. And I even managed to leave before dawn (a nod to AareneX's insistence that I SLEEP) :) And no, I did not indulge in cookies. Going to the doc and getting on their (theoretically) calibrated scale and seeing your blood pressure stats can provide all sorts of motivation......

So am I still on track? Ummm.....sure. At this point as long as I remember to load the horse feed in the trailer on Thursday I think everything else critical is taken care of.

On to Thursday!

4 comments:

  1. Well, at least you're sleeping!

    I'm not sure how much of your planned activities for Wednesday were vital, so it seems like it was a good idea to abort those plans and take care of important stuff (like your own physical and mental health!) instead.

    Have you tried combining them all? Maybe gone for a jog with Farley while playing the fiddle?

    I'm just sayin'....

    WV: squattap
    your PT will have you doing 50squattaps in no time at all!

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  2. I think that is the point of these posts this week - that you can have a plan, but things WON'T go according to plan, and that's OK. I think sometimes people feel like (I know I certaintly do) that everyone else's ride prep goes exactly according to plan, and it's just THEIR lives where everything falls apart.

    There's only few essentials that need to happen before a ride - everything else is gravy. Yep, it would have been cool to have been able to run and ride more this week - but it's not a deal breaker for a completion on this ride. The devil is in the details, but the devil is ALSO in getting TOO caught up with the details.

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  3. My farrier says that we should make a deal with mother nature, it can rain all it wants, but only at night!

    My farrier apperently does melt in the rain as he rescheduled at the last minute yesterday because it started raining again.

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  4. I'm glad to hear that you went to the doctor and that you get to go to a PT. Less pain will make running an riding a lot more fun : )

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