Yeah, that's right... I'm jogging

Today was my weekly physical therapy appointment and today I JOGGED.

I looked at my PT cross-eyed when he suggested I jog across the room (it's a big room - a sports facility-sized room) and back again. "Jog?" I asked "You want me to JOG! Umm... ok."

To back up a bit, this all came about because he is impressed with my progress to-date. Although we have steadily upped my strength routines in the last few weeks, I have not had any major flare-ups. Well, nothing unusual - just the usual pain. Which is progress on it's own because more exercise usually equals more pain. More exercise with same pain is therefore super-fantastic.

So, he was feeling ambitious with me today. We did lots of butt exercises (I'm gonna have a nice touchey by the time I'm done with this guy) and lots of "Monster Walks" (walking like a zombie across the room with a resistance band around my knees - I know attractive!) and then he said the jog thing.

Now, I don't know how much you remember of my laundry-list of shouldn'ts and won'ts and cant-even-try-that's, but jogging of any sort has been on there for some time. Even attempting to get all ambitious with a quick sprint across the road usually results in me feeling as though my right femur is about to dislodge from the hip socket. I am not exaggerating here, by the way. I exaggerate with A LOT of things on this blog for dramatic effect and will happily cop to it as needed but, on this particular point, I am literally describing what it has felt like to break out of a walk. So, understandably, just the idea of jogging boggled my mind.

The catch was, he said, that I had to do it so that he could barely hear my feel make a sound on the floor, which elicited a major "huh?" from me. How do you run without making a sound? Who does that? Except, maybe, cat burglar - a hobby which, though my past has been ever-so glam and exciting, I have never indulged in. Anyway, I digress.

The point was that I had to somehow prance my flabby, post-baby body across the open gym - a gym full of testosterone-hyped, professional and high school athletes - without making a sound. I couldn't see it so I asked my PT for a demonstration. "And exactly how do YOU jog across the room without making a sound?" I asked him.

He did indeed show me how and, to my horror, prancing was involved - or at least my interpretation of it. It was sort of a torso-straight, slightly leaning forward, ball-of-foot-landing, well... prance. Just like a Lipizzaner Stallion. Soooooper. However, when I mimmicked it, I gotta admit, it felt different - good different and a hell of a lot better that whatever jog I was doing before. Most importantly, I made it across the room and back without my femur popping out of my hip socket. That in itself is a progress report. Even Mr. PT was impressed. Jogging was not something either of us had anticipated adding to the routine this early on - for me, ever!


We ended the day's routine with more walking and some jogging, under supervision from his assistant, Dustin. That's where I got a lesson on walking. Apparently I've been doing it wrong for the last 35 years. DUH! I've been flapping the ball of my foot onto the floor like a duck and jerking my body up-and-down with each step in a way which Dustin very tactfully explained was not all that attractive to watch. (Gee, thanks. You think someone would have mentioned this before now!) Again I had to practice being almost soundless in my footfalls, which, for me, involved less worrying about my straight back, abs, knees, or legs, but more about my feet, rolling from heel through toe. Amazingly he also told me to widen my stride which, from my previous PT's advice, is something I have been trying to narrow for the past several months. (Let's hear it for another set of contradicting instructions.) By doing both I not only found that my walking felt less jerky but also more fluid. Also, according to Dustin, I looked a lot more graceful - BONUS!

What's crazy to me through all this learning to sit right, stand right, bend-over right, walk right and run right is that nobody ever teaches us this stuff as kids or young adults. While we're spending so much time nurturing our kids' minds and social skills we mostly forget to even concern ourselves with their physical development unless, of course, there is something grossly out-of-whack. If so many people are getting this stuff wrong, at it seems as though they may very well be from casual observation, and back pain is one of the most common causes of absence from work (which I believe it is) it seems to me that, as a society, we're missing something here.

Physically we're just sort of launched into the world with little more than instinct as our guide and it's little wonder that we injure ourselves repeatedly and, by the time we're in our 30s, wind up with chronic pain issues. Even when we try to do the right thing and head out to the gym to "feel the burn", we usually have no idea what we're doing, use poor form, and then injure ourselves again. For those of us who don't get to the gym, we let our core languish, forcing our backs to do more than the fair share of work, and further exacerbate our crappy body mechanics with basic muscle imbalances.

While everyone is looking at preventative lifestyle measures to reduce rates of diabetes, heart disease, and cancer, maybe we should also be looking at ways to teach ourselves to use our bodies correctly, to avoid back pain, neck pain, hip pain, and headaches?

Learning Lessons

I am bold (and vain) enough to think that I'm a pretty smart cookie. So, why is it that I sometimes continue to make the same mistakes?

This week I made a fatal error in judgment and did something that I thought I'd learned a lesson from in many different ways, from many different mistakes in the past. The outcome was almost exactly the same as it had been in similar situations in the past (making a bad situation worse) and yet I was STILL initially surprised. I remained in denial for several hours, where I blamed everything from the unknowable to the fact that I had let my heart get ahead of my brain. (As if I wasn't in control of that very process!)

After several hours had passed and I had time to reflect, I managed to piece together all of those similar situations that I should have cross-applied and it felt like I'd been hit over the head with a very heavy mallet. It was, at once, an "Aha!" as well as a "Duh!" moment. I felt even more chargrinned because I realized that it was a lesson I have had plenty of opportunity to learn.

I think I've learned many lessons in the last six years, particularly. I can't think of any other time in my life (other than when I first moved to the U.S. back in '96) when I have so drastically changed the way I think and react to certain situations in life. I'm not exactly sure exactly why this time of my life has been so influential, although I have some theories.

Part of it, I think, is that I have met some pretty amazing people who have made a huge impact on the way I look at the world and view my own actions; courageous, compassionate, thoughtful, people who demonstrate strength of character through personal growth and self-reflection. My husband is one of those people, by the way. It's so wonderful to be married to someone who shows you how to be a better person. But that's an aside...

Of course, almost all of these lessons I have learned came from making mistakes.

I'm not afraid of making mistakes, and never really have been, but I was, for a long time, afraid of owning them. Notice I didn't say 'owning-up' to them, although that was part of it too. Owning up to a mistake is the easy part (although, for a lot of people, that's a big step all on it's own.) You admit you did something, you apologize (if needed), and then you go on your merry little way in life.

However, owning mistakes (to me) means trying to understand why I made the mistake, taking ownership of those reasons and the outcomes, and making decisions about what (if anything) I would do differently if the same or similar situation happened again.

So now it's even more of a dumbass moment when I realize the lesson I learned got lost somewhere along the way; that I failed to retrieve it at the critical moment of decision and fell right back into an old pattern.

What's also different for me is the speed at which I will readily admit I messed up.

It's not like I didn't have any moments of self-reflection before or never apologized to people but it usually took a lot more time, space, and emotional detachment from the event before I could truly see my own actions clearly. I was blocked, I realize now, by the fact that I would want to defend myself, to sorta-kinda admit that I did something wrong but, at the same time, throw in ten reasons as to why I did what I did - usually excuses that blamed something or someone external.

Now I attempt to fall on my sword right away; get it out of the way as soon as possible by apologizing and accepting (and I mean that as more than a surface-level admission) that I made a mistake or did the wrong thing. Until recently, I didn't realize how much time and emotional energy that took up: trying to hide something, consciously, that was subconsciously, banging on a door to be let out. All your emotional energy is being spent on just trying to keep that door closed at all costs, rather than really dealing with what comes out when you open it. Let's face it, you usually end up dealing with it anyway, at some point down the road and then, sometimes, it's too late to repair whatever you damaged.

So, I messed up. I guess we all do it. They say may all your mistakes be new ones but sometimes you just don't live up to that for whatever reason. I suppose the biggest lesson of all that I can say that I have learned is to accept the lessons themselves. Ten years ago I would still be in the defensive, blaming, denial phase of my dumbass move. Now, I'm mortified I messed up, I've apologized to all who I affected, and I can already clearly see my own actions and the real reasons behind them. Let's hope I can pull this one out of the memory bank and not make a similar mistake again.