This summer (back in the time I like to refer to as BFU–Before Flare Up) I accomplished a major goal of mine–running in a race. I signed up with my good friend, Runner Kelsey, and by “signed up” I mean, “was forced to register upon pain of death because she was sick of hearing my complaints about not doing anything exciting.” So, since Miss K was sick of hearing about my boring life, she decided to give me a goal, run a 5k with her on Father’s Day.
We headed over to the race course (at a high school about 20 minutes away) and prepared ourselves for the burning heat. I was a little nervous before we got started, but not overwhelmingly so. It was a verry small race with a lot of kids and old folks (it was called the Run With Dad race–so yeah, there were some pretty old dads). Anyway, the important thing wasn’t my time (32:00) or the fact that it was entirely uphill and over 85 degrees outside, nope. The important thing was that I finished. And I felt damn good.
I'ma beast.
Sidenote: Look at how happy I was! A sigh of nostalgia for my tanned skin and toned arms. Now my arms are limp noodles and my skin is pallid with a tint of orange from all the carrots I eat (no seriously, I have orange hands, knees and toes).
Moving right along…I signed up for another race 3 weeks later, a 4th of July race in temperatures above 90 degrees. I felt like straight up passing out at the end and disregarded all of my training and just sat down afterward, in better shape than some fellow runners who barfed at the end. Ick. 29:23 was my time–I almost cried when I saw that I made it under 30 minutes. From then on decided that I was going to call myself a “runner” and train for a 10k–maybe even a 20k in September! I thought I could do it.
Fast forward a couple of weeks and I’m running 5 miles on weekends and a couple shorter distances during the week, when–bam. I’m sidelined with the illness outlined here. I quite literally came to a screeching halt.
The point of this post isn’t to really talk about my sickness–that will come at another time. I just wanted to say that I went running again for the first time in months on Sunday…and frankly, it did not go well. I don’t know if you’ve ever just stopped doing all forms of physical exercise for a couple of months, but it’s damn near impossible to get started again. For approximately 1 minute I jogged along rocking out to some Gaga on my ipod and thought, “hey! This isn’t as bad as I thought it would be!” And then another 30 seconds passed. My legs felt like they were about to fall off, my lungs were on fire, my stomach clenched up in protestation of the strain that was being placed on it, and I had to stop. I took a couple of deep breaths and just started walking. I don’t think that pipe-dream Turkey Trot 5k is going to happen–who am I kidding? I can barely run for 1 minute, let alone 1 mile.
Honestly, I’m trying to be okay with a mile-long walk with Rat Dog and my momma in the evenings. Like Miss SnackFace just wrote, why aren’t more people content with walking as a form of exercise? I’m going to rock out the walks for now, and maybe someday I’ll walk myself to a half-marathon 
I know that there are lots of folks out there who have had to deal with physical and emotional setbacks after an injury (or disease, in my case)–how did you deal with it? How long did it take for you to get back into the swing of things?
While I realize that my physical setback was very different from yours — I choose to have a baby while UC choose you — I can still relate to the reality of being a shell of your former fit self. It is so discouraging, and you are left feeling like you will never be the same again.
I am sure you remember how frustrated I was when I could barely get around the lake at mom and dad’s post-baby after being able to hike and work out daily pre-baby.
The thing is, you have to give yourself a longer turnaround time (this was a very hard concept for me to grasp, but once I did, and once you do, you will feel so much better). It took 5+ long months of your body being ravaged by an awful illness to get to this point, so it isn’t fair to ask it to return to normal after just a few weeks, or even a few months.
You need to give your body the same amount of time it took to regress to restore itself. 5 months of illness = 5 months until you are back to your normal fit self. Just focus on the long term and know that your body will get back there, she just operates on a different timeline than you do.
Good for you for trying! Baby steps. You don’t have to be where you were before straight away, it’s all about doing a bit more than yesterday.
xx