Ragemaster

Halfway to running?  Another ten weeks and maybe I can try.

Today at the PT, one of the assistants put me on the treadmill and said I should go as fast as I can -- even run.  I guess he doesn't really understand what I've got, especially since the doctor was adamant about me not running.

The daily increase in weights and the addition of the stairmaster, leg curls, and leg extensions have started to help my strength.  As usual, though, my leg doesn't look any bigger.  I still have a limp when I'm walking since it seems that I've reprogrammed the walking part of my brain to compensate for the brace.  Now I've got to unlearn that.  Walking back from the office today, I made a conscious effort to bring my leg up bent, almost marching to try to get rid of the limp.  I felt better doing that but it still isn't anywhere near natural.

Stairs have gotten better and I have a hard time believing that I can go up and down them without pain.  When I see stairs, I see fear.  It takes a lot of courage for me to go down them using my left leg.  Up isn't so bad, but going down, before the surgery, was when I had all the problems.  It seems to be a huge improvement.

Over the weekend I was heading towards campus when I passed a group of law students.  One of them was talking about her knee and how she had been running on it for months with it bothering her.  It turned out it was a torn meniscus.  It sounded a lot like what happened to me, before the surgery, but tearing the meniscus has a two week recovery time from the surgery.  You can walk out of the surgery and go right back to running after a few weeks without any serious problems.  With knee injuries on the brain, I pick up all kinds of stuff about people getting hurt that I wouldn't have even thought of a year ago.  Tons of football players get into trouble every weekend and you hear about it on the commentary.  Like the girl I overheard a few days ago, I overhear all kinds of conversations about people and their knees hurting.  And, of course, at PT, there are plenty of people with knee problems, lots of them coming back from knee replacements.

Lately, I've really felt unable to get away from everything, that no matter where I go I've got to share my personal space with other people.  The smallest things are starting to bother me.  In the office, there's at least seven or eight other grad students around talking about stuff.  Outside there are mobs of tourists and other students -- I get asked for directions at least once every few days and someone always stares at me because of the brace or limp.  In my apartment, I've got to deal with my roommate and his fiancee.  Yesterday, I realized what was missing.  Running and biking somehow alleviated that "walls are closing in" feeling: it's hard to get mad when you're tired.  On the roads or trails there isn't anyone to bother me and everything just gets zoned out.  An hour of running or biking feels like three or four hours of doing work or reading or just messing around on the internet. Without it, days just whip by and I don't get the same sense of accomplishment.  Hopefully soon I will be able to bike more and I won't feel like I'm going insane.

Tomorrow I'm off to Raleigh for a conference and I'll see how it goes in an environment other than school.  I'm hoping there are bikes or elliptcal machines in the hotel so I can continue to work on my range of motion, leg strength, and just get in some kind of workout.

I finally got hold of my teammate who had microfracture on his knee a few years ago.  We talked for over an hour and I got an idea of what his take was on the whole injury->surgery->recovery process.  It was good to actually talk to someone that I knew that had this done to get an idea of where I stand.

I knew that he had some kind of knee issue that required surgery and a long recovery but I wasn't sure that it was microfracture.  It happened to him during the summer after my junior year of undergraduate while he was a freshman.  I remember talking to my coach over the summer about how everyone was doing and he mentioned my teammate as having some kind of major knee issue that had to do with the cartilage.  I remember returning to school and practice in the fall and seeing him do his therapy in the athletic training room.  Every time I went in there to get some ice or stretch, he was in there on the bike or doing some kind of exercises.  There were plenty of times I remember being in there and he wasn't having a good time or something was hurting and the trainers were telling him to take it easy; that there were good days and bad days.  Finally, I don't remember seeing my teammate doing workouts again until March of my senior year -- he started having issues in April or May of the previous year, so it was quite awhile before he was back to training normally again.

I didn't really think too much of it -- when I was healthy and running well I tended to forget about those on the team that were injured.  They went to the meetings at the beginning of practice and then I didn't see them until I was stretching or in the shower.  Usually I only really paid attention when someone I ran with regularly on maintenance runs or as part of a workout group suddenly disappeared one day.  I would be aware that they were injured for a few runs or workouts and then it would kind of slip my mind as I got used to them not being around.  Of course, when I was the one that was injured, which happened at least once per season, I always seemed aware of everyone else that was hurt.  We all spent plenty of time in the training room trying to get better.  Overall, I spent most of my worrying about trying to stave off or heal my own injuries. It seemed that some tendon or muscle was always about to take me out of the lineup, was in the process of keeping me from running, or trying to blow up again as I restarted training.  Of course, once one problem was on its way out, something else was desperately trying to start up.

Unlike me, my teammate said there wasn't anything that he remembered as the cause of his cartilage defect.  His doctor said he probably ran into something, but he didn't remember doing anything like that.  One day he remembered running a steeple race and being fine, and the next day on a long run the pain started.  It slowly got worse for awhile as our coach told him the problem was an IT band injury.  After a lot of stretching and no improvement he went in to see a doctor at home, which eventually led to his diagnosis.

His defect must have been more weight bearing than mine, as he said that it hurt when he walked, whereas mine didn't.  Like me, my teammate also had a lot of popping and locking in the joint with every leg extension.  Before the surgery, his doctor told him that the microfracture-induced fibrocartilage would most likely last about three or four years, enough to get him through his college career, but after that it might break down.  My doctor didn't really say this, but this short-term success seems to be the general assessment on the Internet.  He (and my PT) have said that the tissue will break down faster if I return to hard training, so I'm not really inclined to do that.

During the surgery, the doctor had to move my teammate's patella so that it wouldn't rub against the microfracture area.  The idea was so that bending the knee wouldn't scrape away the fibrocartilage-forming clot.  I was kept in a motion-limiting brace to prevent this from happening for the first couple weeks, but I didn't have my whole patella adjusted.  He said the defect area was about the size of a thumbnail, which seems to be smaller than the area I had that was more like two thumbnails.  My teammate said that he didn't have any pain in the microfracture area after the surgery but he could feel something in there sometimes.  Following the surgery, he was on crutches for about five weeks, biking at about two months, and then started running at about five months.  It was about seven months before running seemed more normal.  He also remarked that his leg strength didn't come back until nearly a year after the surgery and even today, four years after, the bad leg still seems smaller.  He still can't squat on his bad leg either.

My teammate remarked that I should really focus on abductor and adductor exercises which the PT really has me focus on.  It's one of the things I work on during my morning routine.  He remarked on this because he had a lot of tendinitis issues as he returned to running that would have been lessened with more leg strength.  Other than that, my teammate made it through the last two and a half years of his college career successfully and wasn't held back by his knee.  His mileage was high and he did all the workouts and raced well.  I remember running with him through some of the more treacherous trails around here last year, so I know his knee could definitely tolerate trail running.  He still ran 50 miles a week through the summer and is still doing well today.  It's great to hear that his microfracture procedure and recovery were a complete success and it's a good motivational tool.  Since I don't have to worry about burning eligibility or missing races, I can take it easy during my recovery and not force anything.  As I've mentioned before, just being able to run again to some degree will make my surgery a complete success.

Yesterday marked over two months since the surgery.  I've come a long way, but there's a long way to go too.  I'm now allowed to bike and elliptical on my own, so I took advantage of that today and went to the school rec center: 15 minutes on the bike, and ten on the elliptical.  This I did in addition to my usual morning weight routine which takes nearly 45 minutes.  It would be great to bike outside, especially since the weather is nice today, but I don't think I'm ready for that and won't be for awhile.  My leg still shakes with weakness after 15 minutes.  Also, it seems that my good knee has been hurting and popping some, which must be some kind of compensation problem.  I'm hoping it's nothing serious and just a mild consequence of putting most of my weight on the good knee, since the pain started when I was on the crutches.

Last night one of my old teammates who goes to dental school in Richmond came down to see the team massage therapist.  I dropped by while he was there since I hadn't seen him since the summer.  The massage guy, who punished and tortured me for so many years, had an interesting comment about leg strength that I hadn't heard before: your quads should be 20 percent stronger than your hamstrings.  That is, if you are on a leg press that works your quads, you should use 100 pounds if you are using 80 pounds on a leg curl machine for your hamstrings.  No wonder runners have so much trouble with knees: quads get very little action compared to hamstrings and calves.  Biking can change that, though.

My teammate's got knee issues like I do and has been out ever since dominating the Boston marathon last spring.  He really hasn't been able to run since then and an MRI indicated grade 1 or 2 damage to the articular cartilage.  That's where the cartilage is bruised or has a small divot in it, but not like my grade 4 where it's chipped out all the way to the bone.  He seems so motivated to run again and get back into regular training, but with permanent damage like that, it may not be possible.  Since his damage wasn't as severe as mine, the docs say surgery wouldn't accomplish anything, which leaves him out in the cold if the pain persists.  Hopefully most of the pain is caused by some inflammation from whatever he did and once that subsides he'll be able to run again, but if I were him I would change my mindset.  Right now, I would consider my recovery a success if I am able to run 20 -30 miles a week.  It's so bad because he was running so well and even got some sponsorship offers.  Maybe it's not as bad and he'll be out there kicking butt again soon.

It begs an interesting philosophical question: would you like to run the race of your life knowing that you would never be able to run again?  You would sacrifice everything to blow the field out of the water.  Your time and place would be so much better than you ever hoped it would be, but when you finished, you would never be able to start again.  Would that be worth it instead of having a lifetime career of running but only making modest personal gains?  I don't know for sure, but I do like running just to be outside and to feel like I accomplished something.

I'm finally making some headway on the latest school project.  It should be an interesting experiment since we will get to wear some sensors for awhile to test our model.  Since we are going to use human test subjects, my advisor blindly checked off some box about it when sending in the research proposal to the school.  Now they are making us fill out all this liability stuff and explain our exact test procedure when we aren't really finalized on everything.  And, we, the researchers working on the project, are the only ones who are going to be the subjects, so I think we are completely aware of any "dangers" that go along with wearing some sensors.

Lastly, I got home to vote absentee at the city municipal center when I was on fall break.  I got that taken care of since I'll be at SenSys on election day.  Really, I don't think either presidential candidate matches my choices.  Obama's tax plan raises marginal tax rates for those who make under $45k per year (poor grad student). McCain plans to freeze all research spending for a year after he enters office.  Obama hasn't even finished a full term in the Senate; McCain is going to be 80 if he gets elected for two terms.

Both have the wrong idea on the economy.  The problem goes beyond government regulation or lack of it.  It starts with individuals.  A lot of people today are lazy and want everything for nothing. They want the car and house they can't afford, so they go into credit card debt and default on their mortgage.  They want the college that puts them $40k in the hole only to graduate and bus tables.  They want health care and retirement benefits without lifting a finger.  These people purchase what they can't afford and then expect everyone else to pay for it when the repo man comes knocking.  It's a sense of entitlement and it drives me mad.  Here's a hint to fix this mess: stop buying stuff that you can't afford or shouldn't be, get off your ass, and start contributing to society.  The same mindset of the CEOs with enormous golden parachutes and corrupt politicians taking enormous sums from lobbyists is present in everyone.  If this persists, we'll be in a barter economy real soon.  The problem is that the candidates and government can't blame the constituents without taking heat for it and risking their own jobs and re-election.  The solution starts from the bottom up, with you and me, not from the top down (government).

The physical therapist suddenly increased my activity level.  Until this week, everything was pretty easy, but this week was different.  I do the bike with hard resistance -- it feels like going up a steep hill for 15 minutes.  Since my legs are so weak, it probably isn't that much resistance, but it sure seems like it.  Then, they had me get on the elliptical.  That was about the highest my heart rate has been since before the surgery.  If that wasn't enough, there were tons of step and stair routines that they started me on.  Until now, I avoided stairs as much as possible and always put my weight on the good leg.  Not anymore.  Plus they increase the weight each time I come in for all the weight machines and free weights.  This, combined with my free weight routine in the morning really wears me out.  It's probably because I'm not used to it. 

The PT thinks the pain I'm having is coming from where my IT band attaches to the tibia, which is good because it's not in the joint.  He said a lot of pressure was offloaded onto my IT band after the cartilage tear as a "protective" measure.  It seems to explain the shockwave of pain I had that went up from below my knee when I had the tear and when I had occasional pain during the two or so years leading up to it.   Now, it kind of makes sense since I haven't bent my leg much and everything has tightened up.  Stretching more should help this and I've already noticed it feeling better towards the end of the week.  Overall, my leg strength is getting better but I still have trouble walking correctly and it's still going to be awhile before I can bike for a prolonged period of time.

No more crutches.  I gave them up last weekend and it's been great ever since.  I have a great deal of trouble bending my knee properly when I walk which is going to take awhile to work out.  The therapist shortened the brace which helps, but everything will come in time.  My range of motion is better too, at about 120 degrees, but at that point it feels like my leg is going to break off.  Until that improves, I won't be able to use the regular stationary bike, much less the road bike.

I think my leg strength has improved significantly in the week that I've been walking and I no longer feel like I'm about to topple over.  At PT they have me using the leg press and this hamstring machine with actual weights instead of the spring machines I was using before.  Hopefully that will help me get back to normal more quickly.  My leg still looks like a stick and it takes an incredible amount of effort to stand on my right leg and lift the bad one.  15 minutes on the recumbent bike is getting easier and my leg isn't shaking when I finish.  I can't imagine what would happen if I tried to bike with real resistance or even run at this point.  I wouldn't last two steps.  Again, it will take a few more months to really get everything back.

The physical therapist thinks that the popping and pain that I get occasionally is scar tissue.  "Scar tissue" seems to be the catch-all explanation for pain that I've received from my past coaches, multiple massage therapists, and athletic trainers while on the team.  What is scar tissue, anyway?  Why does it cause pain?  Is it really "scar tissue", or is it the kneecap digging out the formation of fibrocartilage?  I couldn't really find a definitive answer on the internet, so I'm not really sure.  I know you get scars from really bad cuts, maybe the scar is swollen and gets in the way of other stuff that moves around, which is what causes the pain.

I've continued to do leg strengthening and upper body exercises in the morning and going out for walks in the afternoons.  It's better than nothing, but now that I'm walking again I suddenly have the urge to go out and run and bike.  Nobody had better ever again bother me about being obsessive about running every day.  I went every day because I could, because I enjoyed it, and I knew that I might as well "get while the gettin's good."  Because on a day like today, I might not be able to run and I don't have to regret any days that I was too lazy to go.  Lots of guys on the team would give me grief about running every day during the active rest phase of our training.  I knew that I was healthy and in shape and I wanted to make the most of it.  It's a waste if you don't, because there will be days when you are injured and can't go.  So, I say to those with good knees: make the most of every day and don't waste your talent or effort: get out there and run.  Enjoy it.

Today while doing one of the leg exercises at the therapist and then again when I moved my knee at my desk, I felt the unmistakable pain I had before the surgery.  It was just as sharp and pronounced as ever.  I wonder if there is any new tissue at all where the microfracture was, or if there was, I've destroyed it.

It's the pain I always felt for the first minute or two on the bike, but it would go away.  When I ran the pain seemed different, almost duller and deeper in the joint but just as uncomfortable.  Before the surgery, I don't really remember having that kind of pain when not running or biking.

I know what I do that causes it: extending my leg when it's off the ground.  I have to try to avoid doing that.  I didn't think much of it when it happened the first time today, but the second time really got to me.  I'll say something to the PT about it on Friday.  Until now, I didn't have much pain at all in the knee, especially where the microfracture was.

It could be a sign that I've been a bit too aggressive coming back since I did do a few minutes of biking and I'm almost off using one crutch.  The doctor wanted me off the crutches soon and the PT seemed to think my progress was fine.  Maybe if I go a bit easier on things I will have spared my knee.  I know almost everyone has pain following microfracture, but I wonder if the pain they get is the pain they had before the surgery.

Hopefully it's okay, but I've got a feeling otherwise.  I'm really afraid of being a cripple for the rest of my life.

And then I'll be incapacitated. I feel basically fine now, except that my knee has been popping a lot more than usual. It's still more annoying than anything, but I don't want to risk running on it either. I'm not looking forward to the next few months at all but it's something I have to go through if I want everything to eventually return to normal. I've stocked up on frozen food so I won't have to mess with trying to cook anything while I can't move around very well.

It turns out that one of my teammates did have microfracture surgery before and at the end of his 6+ month recovery, he was running and working out again with everyone else. It took a lot of work to get back into shape, but he did it and is still running without problems today. Tomorrow I am supposed to meet with the orthopedic surgeon to sign some paperwork and try to figure out what will happen in the days/weeks/months following the surgery.

My cell phone was slowly breaking down over the last few months and finally seemed to give up the ghost yesterday. Aside from the 10-15 minute battery life, it had gradually been unable to connect with the cell network. For awhile, it would randomly lose and reconnect with the network, but yesterday it was "No Service" everywhere I went while everyone else I saw was yakking it up. Normally I don't talk on the phone very much, but when I'm out on the bike or driving somewhere and something breaks down, it's good to have. I'll have to figure out what to do about this and I am not sure I want to plunk down more money for something that's intentionally designed to wear out after a few years. I really just want something that can make calls and has a long battery life; all that other crap like pictures, video, unwieldy web browsing, and text messaging I have no need for.

Yesterday my mom dropped by and we took the ferry to Surry and tried going to a barbecue place for dinner. Naturally, it was closed on Tuesdays. An hour of driving and the ferry trip and there wasn't much else out there, except for the Virginia Diner, so we went there instead. It wasn't bad, but not all that great either. I've seen that place while driving by on 460 several times, but never ate anything there. We've stopped a few times to buy some of the peanuts and peanut brittle they have, but never the food.

As we drove through Surry county, I saw lots of signs and bumper stickers reading "No OLF" in giant red letters, protesting one of the potential sites for the Navy outlying landing field for all the planes at Oceana and Cherry Point to practice landings. A much bigger protest has been going on in Northeastern NC for a lot longer since that was the Navy's first choice. My mom said she couldn't blame them for protesting it since a lot of people live out in the middle of nowhere to avoid stuff like that, but the funny thing is that is the same reason why the Navy wants to build there in the first place: there's nothing around. For over 20 years I've lived within 5 miles of Oceana and the jets flying around at all hours never really bothered me. In fact, I sleep way better at home than I ever do in Williamsburg, where it's usually quiet. Sometimes the quiet seems kind of unnerving because I almost expect there to be some kind of background noise of planes flying and cars driving down the nearby highways. It's probably why Williamsburg seems so tired to me. That said, I can't really fault the people in Surry for protesting either since they were there first and live there so they don't have to deal with the noise and irritations of living in the close quarters of a city. If I were one of them, I would feel the same way.

I have only a few more days to enjoy my freedom of movement, and then I'll be confined to crutches. I'm still biking as much as I can and walking everywhere I can too. Not being able to do much else will allow me to spend more time with school, but it's good to have a break. Following a few weeks of downtime, then the real challenge of recovery begins. It's always way harder to recover from an injury than it is to manifest one or take the initial time off after getting one. In the meantime, I'll try to enjoy what I've got.

I've had trouble with the area around my left knee for a few years, but for the most part it had been tolerable. But then, back in late January I was out running one freezing cold morning and my knee just blew up. I heard something snap as a shockwave of pain went through my knee. Since then, my running has been a mess. For a few weeks afterwards I was able to run okay, but with a lot of popping and cracking and irritation. Then I started compensating on the other leg and was out until the late spring because of my right IT band. Despite not running much for several months, the irritation in the left knee never went away. I felt it driving, climbing stairs, and sometimes walking around. I knew something bad had happened and it was only a matter of time before I had to do something about it. Since the IT band got better, I've been running more. That is, until two weeks ago when I began to feel really bad grinding pain in the joint. It was time to face the pain and deal with it.

After two visits to the orthopedist and an MRI, the doctor says I have torn a hole in my articular cartilage that surrounds the joint. The piece that tore out is now floating around above the knee joint, which explains the weird spasms and soreness I have at the end of the lower quad. The good thing (according to the doctor) is that the hole is kind of on the side of the joint, meaning that it doesn't bear much weight. If the hole were on the bottom, I wouldn't be able to walk. The doctor had me do a couple different movements with my leg and was surprised that they didn't cause me much pain. It seemed that the MRI indicated that I was much worse off than I felt. Going in there after the MRI, I was surprised to get such a definitive answer as to what was going on. It seems that most of my past injuries were always ambiguous, but of course they were never this bad.

So now I am scheduled for surgery at the end of August to remove the loose piece of cartilage and to stimulate growth of new cartilage via a process known as "microfracture". They poke holes in the bone where the hole is and cause bleeding and a clot to form. Over time, the area is supposed to form new cartilage. It won't be as good as the original cartilage, but it will be better than nothing and hopefully stop the metal-on-metal grinding that I've had when I last ran.

So now I have to face the prospect of not being able to run again for a very long time. Post-surgery I am supposed to be on crutches for a minimum of four weeks, but I have heard it can take longer before you can walk again. The healing process takes months so it may be that long before I can try running, but the doctor seems to think that I will be able to run again with no problem. This is good, but it really sucks that I won't be able to do much for a long while. A couple other guys on the team have had similar problems and have had long, frustrating recoveries. I have to remember that the damage has already been done and that I will have to get the surgery or else the piece floating around in the knee could cause further complications.

Things will get worse before they get better, but it sounds like many people are able to pick up where they left off running-wise after having the same surgery. If I don't get this done and deal with it, then I'll never have a chance of getting back to where I was.

I find this funny, because a year ago I remarked to Keith when we were in Sacramento that I had probably done some permanent damage to myself after running in college for five years. At that point an area below the knee had been bothering me for over a year and was getting increasingly sore. The soreness below the knee seemed to come and go with time, sometimes going away for months at a time. Over last summer and into the fall it seemed to go away almost completely, but then it came back in the winter and seemed to be the basis for the blowup in January. The doctor wondered what I had done to cause such a problem but neither he nor I could seem to come up with an explanation as to why things progressed from the soreness to the sudden explosion.

For the past few weeks I've been biking, but sometimes I can feel something in the knee when I just start out or really jam on the pedals. It hasn't been too bad and it's just as well because it's been so hot. Biking in Williamsburg is pretty enjoyable since it's only about 10 minutes to rural farm roads. I did go home this past weekend and fought the tourists biking on Atlantic Ave.

All the stuff for my M.S. degree has been turned in and I should get my diploma at the end of August. I don't think there is a ceremony or anything but I think I'm allowed to go to the spring graduation in 2009. My sister and I can "graduate" at the same time. I'll still be here another two, three or more years, though. I'm glad I decided to do the Ph.D., considering the alternative of working in a cube farm as usual and doing something boring and mundane that some boss wants me to do. The work here has been challenging and has kept my interest. The work from my M.S. project is being refined into a conference paper that we will try to get out within a month. I've read some strong arguments as to why to not get a Ph.D., but at this point I figure I have nothing to lose as long as I am fully funded and am making progress towards completion. Most of the arguments are about the increasing difficulty of getting a tenured faculty position, but most likely I will go into industry. Those at the places I've worked that had Ph.D.s had a lot of control over what they worked on and also seemed indispensable to their organization. They had a lot more creative license than the regular code monkeys. I just can't see myself being a regular run of the mill programmer for the rest of my life, always doing what someone else tells me to. Anyhow, if it hits the fan while I'm here, I can get out with my M.S. and still get a regular job.

A lot has been on my mind the past few months, but recently it's been dominated by this mess with my knee. The coming months are going to be a bigger test of willpower and attitude than during any period during my high school or college running career.

I seem to be in a cycle with this thing. I run for a few days and then the irritation builds, forcing me to take at least a day off. I don't think it's any coincidence that these cycles match the weather. When it's nice out and I run, the IT band feels good and I'm able to run again the next day. But, the typical weather here is that it's nice (warm) for a day or two and then it sucks. Kind of like today. It was cold, windy, and rainy. I felt fine running but I got tighter earlier than normal and did stop to stretch but I went too far and it seems pretty sore afterwards.

I wore pants that got completely waterlogged and started to fall off, so I kept pulling them up. That probably was the cause of my problems. I should have stopped and dealt with it rather than running weird because of it.

Wearing more clothes in the cold crappy winter rain doesn't really help. You're good for about 15 minutes and then all the extra crap you put on just soaks through and weighs you down. If it's bad enough the wind will cool down the wet clothes and then I start to freeze. Occasionally after a really crappy day it seems that my clothes have accumulated about five pounds of water weight and even more when I go on muddy trails since the mud accumulates too.

Feeling fine while running and then soreness afterwards seems to be the thing lately. I think I'm okay so I keep going and then afterwards I get punished. Today was the worst that it's been afterwards in awhile. Hopefully the inflammation will go down quickly enough that I only have to take one day off.

It would be nice just to go out and run without having to think about stuff hurting. Maybe sometime in the future.

Slowly I seem to be making progress. Yesterday I ran for 39 minutes and stopped to stretch once. Running around the track in reverse in lane 8 gets old, but it's better than the elliptical, and especially better than not doing anything at all.

Today I was at home and managed to get through the usual 5.5 mile loop through the neighborhoods. It probably helped that there are only two cul-de-sacs that I do any major turning around. I notice my IT band tends to tighten on the curves around the track and also when my form breaks down due to headwinds. I seem to go farther on days when it's warmer, so it was tighter today. Wearing pants counteracts some of the cold, but it doesn't seem to fix it entirely.

I've gone three days in a row with one day off this past week, which is also more than I've done before. I'll probably preempt any major problems by just doing the elliptical tomorrow. I haven't done the elliptical at all the past few days since I feel like I've done some actual running.

This always seems to be the period where I can really screw things up. It seems that things are getting better, so I'll be extra ambitious and then go too far. The pain will come back in a bad way and I'll set myself back a few days or even as much as a week or two depending on how dumb I was.

I'm hoping the trend will continue especially as the weather gets warmer. I have a feeling that it will be quite awhile before I even think about doing 15 mile long runs on little hilly twisty trails through the woods.

It seems everyone else but me got to run today. My big plan was to run the full marathon today, but thanks to the IT band, I won't be running at all. Sarah ran, my mom ran, and two of my best friends/roommates ran along with a whole slew of other people I know. Instead, I was here at home doing work and sleeping in. Maybe one of these days I'll be back to normal.

Jason and Dan stayed at my house last night and then came back after the race to shower. It was nice to see them again. My mom made a ton of pasta and meatballs and a pecan pie and we barely put a dent in any of it. Looks like leftovers for quite awhile (for my mom at least). They went to bed pretty early since Jason wanted to get up at 4 AM to eat.

Everyone was gone when I got up and I was just eating breakfast when they got back from the race. It was 9:30 and they had cooled down and driven back. That was hard to believe. Jason ran around 65 minutes and Dan 1:11, both really good times. Despite the winds it sounds like everything went well.

I was able to run 30 minutes the past two days but the IT band was pretty sore afterwards yesterday so going today probably isn't a good idea. Every few days or so it seems I have to take off or else the pain will get significantly worse. It's so frustrating with everyone else out running and doing well while I'm stuck in this purgatory. Two guys on the team that had been injured for the past year and a half with various things ran their first college races over the weekend at VCU, which was really good for them.

On a side note, the PSP has worked really well for watching movies and TV shows while I'm on the elliptical. I get a machine facing the window and put on a Star Trek or CSI episode and I'm good for an hour. Then I just pick up the next day where I left off or load on some new stuff. The glare can get bad, but it's only a minor issue.

Out of all the problems I've had with running injuries, the IT band seems the weirdest. With all my other soft tissue stuff - achilles, quad/calf strains, anterior tibialis, plantar facscia, and patella problems, any pain at all means I can't run on it. Even a few steps would be enough to make it worse. However, it seems that the IT band can tolerate some discomfort while still making slow day to day progress.

At this point it seems that I can run on it for two or three days and then the irritation builds to a point where I have to take another day or two off. Then, when I come back, I can more or less go around as far as I did when I ran last. When I do run, everything starts off fine and then the area around my knee starts to get tight. It gets progressively tighter and then I've got to stop and stretch it. I can do about two rounds of this before it gets so tight that I can't run on it anymore without the tightness becoming more of a pain. Each round is usually shorter than the previous, to the degree that the second round is about half the time of the first and the third half of the second.

Yesterday was great and I made it about 28 minutes total. I did the same today but I definitely let the pain take over a little which probably wasn't a good idea, so I'll probably be off at least tomorrow and maybe Monday. Then I'll try again. It seems that now most of the problem is around where the IT band attaches to the tibia, which is where everything first started. At one point today I could feel the whole thing yanking at my hip, however.

It does seem like this is taking forever and I'm willing to bet it will be at least another month of this, maybe more. As long as the weather stays warm like it's been, I'll probably get better more quickly. It's just been awhile since I've had an injury that lasts months and even longer since I've had one that kept me off the bike. The elliptical really sucks, but I probably will never get used to it.

Invariably, after any period off from school longer than a weekend, torrents of the same inquisition echo across campus:

How was your break?
Was it a good break?
Where did you go on your break?
What did you do on your break?

Everyone runs around like chickens with their heads cut off screaming these same irritating questions at each other. "Blah blah blah break blah blah blah." I would venture to say that 95% of the students do the same thing as I do: go home and do nothing. I ran into a bunch of teammates on Friday before I left as most were heading to practice for a workout. They all seemed jealous that I got to go home while they all had to stay at school for most of the week to practice and get ready for IC4As. I consider them to be the lucky ones. They get to blaze around the track in tough workouts and head to Boston for one of the meets I've enjoyed the most. Plenty of times this semester I've walked by the track on the way to the UC for dinner and seen everyone working out. It leaves me feeling sad that I'm not a part of that anymore. I would feel a lot better if I could run again normally and I could join them again at least one or two days a week.

Sarah has an elliptical machine at her house so I went over there yesterday and did that while she did some homework. It was better than the rec center since we put on Animal House and I had to strain to see the only clock in the room. The machine was a lot different than the ones at school -- the school ellipticals are more like those nordic trac skiing machines and don't make you cycle your knee through much of a range of motion. This one was more aggressive and its resistance was also greater, which probably put more pressure on my IT band. It didn't hurt, but it seemed a little tight afterwards. I'll try some running today to see how it goes (a couple loops around the block) and maybe head over there for some more elliptical. I don't enjoy it that much, as I've said, but it's better than sitting around and being a bum.

I do have some work to do over the next week. First, I've got to typeset and turn in the Theory of Computation homework that my professor has been so lenient about. I've done the actual work on paper, but now I've got to typeset it, and I feel really lazy and don't want to do anything school related. I've also got to start on the design overview for the sensor network project I'm working on. As it turns out, my Theory of Computation professor said most Master's students who do a project just write a paper based on a proposed system but don't actually implement anything. If I can convince my adviser to finalize our design as quickly as possible (we've been screwing around a bit and changing things), then I might actually be able to get the paper done by the end of March. If I do that, then I'll make the deadline for the Master's project and get my degree in May. That would be nice, but I'm not betting the farm on it. This week I should also modify my TA lab grading script to handle infinite loops when running students' code.

My dad has a trip to San Francisco this week, so that would be cool to go out there and come back, but I doubt there will be empty seats on the plane. Since I'm hurt, worrying about having to run hasn't been bothering me as much, so I can be more flexible about stuff like that. Unfortunately, I'll probably just be stuck here.

Screwing around on the Internet as I do nearly every day, I came across something interesting: a maple-flavored pie that someone had found at some restaurant in Vermont. The pictures and testimonial made it sound really good, so I scoured the Internet for recipes. I found one that appeared on several sites, which took maple sugar. Since you can't really get that in a store around here, I ordered some from Vermont and made the recipe with the help of my mom (with the crust). It wasn't all that great and didn't look like anything in the pictures. It came out more like a maple flavored quiche -- very eggy. Later, I found the recipe that was probably the one in the pictures and variations of it. Basically, just condensed milk or cream, maple syrup, and some versions have flour, but no eggs. I could try making that one.

Being able to eat decent food and sleep in my own bed are two great things about being at home this week. Since the first day of my freshman year, I've never slept well at school, but as soon as I'm home, I'm out like a rock every night. I don't know what gives. Also, the UC food has been really crappy and repetitive as of late, especially with regards to having some kind of vegan patty just about every night as the main attraction. Being able to eat good stuff again has improved my mood.

So, that pretty much sums it up for the next week or so. I guess now it's off to see how my IT band does today.