In Which We Talk About Being Sidelined

Posted on July 28, 2010 by Laura Georgina

Last week, I had a grand old time with some at-home Zumba and a less-grand time with some kitchen cleaning.  One of the two did my knee in.  I hate to admit it, but I think it was the Zumba.

Since then, I’ve been sidelined.  Sigh

I’m not in any kind of serious pain, but I can feel my knee at times when I shouldn’t be feeling my knee, if you know what I mean.  Basically, my knee feels like it was taken off me, sloshed about in a martini shaker, and returned to me with an errant cube of ice still whooshing around in there.

This is definitely not the first time my knee has forced me to simmer down–I won’t go into the blasted boring details and I’ll just say that my IT band and patellofemoral pain syndrome have kept me on my toes as long as I have been exercising.  Nor is this by any means the most annoying of the knee injuries (I think my yoga-induced knee tantrum wins the crown on that one) or the most painful (the 2007 IT Band Flare-Up has literal pain in the ass covered).

Since Thursday, when this ignominy went down, I’ve been icing and stretching and treating my knee like the sad diva that it is.  Fortunately, it feels light-years better today than it did yesterday and exponentially better than it did the day before that, so apparently my knee really likes the frozen pea bag treatment and being pampered like it’s Saudi royalty.

Still, the temptation to have a pity party of epic proportions has loomed large.  At one point, I thought of taking an ad out in the newspaper to tell the world my woe.  However, I know that is NOT the way to go and it won’t get the Diva Knee back in working order any sooner.

So, instead of moping about how sad and lonely my Nike+ avatar is looking these days and shaking my fist at the sky every time the sun makes quality pool time tempting, I’ve been focusing on the bright side, in a more introspective way than I focus on the bright side, literally, for all things sartorial.

This boils down to some pretty good pluses (in ascending order of ridiculousness):

  • Total excitement about all things running/swimming/Zumba (the kind of excitement you only get when something is totally off-limits)
  • Time to regroup and be grateful for the fact that I can run at all (and to remind myself that I will get over this like I’ve gotten over the other Diva Knee performances)
  • More quality time with the Core Fusion Pilates Plus abs segment (only the exercises that don’t involve my knees)
  • More quality nose-stuck-in-book time (may I recommend “Eiffel’s Tower” by Jill Jonnes, about the Eiffel tower and the belle epoque shenanigans of artists and industrialists and Buffalo Bill in their Paris playground?)
  • More time to plan/obsess/plot my sewing (though this does NOT translate to tidier sewing area–I’m not that good)
  • Longer-lasting manicures and more time to do them (who knew hot pink with yellow dots would be so wearable?)
  • Less laundry needs to be done (no explaining needed here)
  • Considerable savings on water/shampoo/body wash now that I don’t need so much to remove my post-workout salt crust

So, if all goes to plan and the knee feels good on Friday, I’ll be out sweating and swatting bugs come Monday morning.  I can’t wait to shake it again–and I can’t wait to put that taunting little Nike+ avatar in her place, instigator that she is…

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Here are a couple of good reads for the injured and temporarily wimpy:

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How do you deal with being sidelined?

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