Wow, in one week, it'll have been a year since my back injury. It's weird how fast that year went by, given that it pretty much put my life on hold.
What's Going On?
Things are generally going really really well. I'm having whole windows where I don't really have pain at all.
I still have problems if I try to do too much (for annoyingly varying definitions of "too much") but other than that, I'm down to pretty much chronic stiffness.
What I Can Do:
I'm still doing the Couch to 5K program, though I ran into a bit of a problem when I went to Week 4 and decided to simultaneously up the intensity of the workout. I forgot that my lungs are just as out of shape as the rest of me and wound up giving myself an asthma attack. Oops. But my back itself is doing fine with the workouts.
I haven't done any public skating this month, more for scheduling reasons than anything else. I can only do activities every third day (i.e. with two rest days in between) so I can't really get to everything I want to do. :(
As mentioned in earlier blog posts, I'm borrowing a friend's Ninja 250 and I rode it for about 5 miles last week. Unfortunately the bike still has some mechanical issues (I'll do a separate blog entry for that), but the relevant part here is that my back did just fine. I coincidentally immediately got sick following my ride, so it may be that the forced rest from the illness rested my back as well, but I feel pretty good, physically, about the Ninja 250.
What I Can't Do:
I'm still trying not to carry much. I can pick up a cat now (we have fat cats, so this is actually a bit of a milestone) so maybe I'm at about a 20 lb weight restriction. I definitely try not to carry even that much very far though.
No hockey.
No Beemer at all.
No weight lifting.
What I'm Doing About It:
Couch to 5K for my lungs and back.
I still try to get massages, though I've been lax about that for a couple of weeks due to work schedules and then getting sick. I have to get back to that.
I do a lot of self-massage with tennis balls, trying to break up the trigger points that have formed in my back.
Still sitting a lot in the Relax The Back zero gravity recliner. Especially now with this chest cold where I'm home sick from work, it's helping my back to sit in the recliner for a good part of the day. In fact, I'm going to get up from my home desk chair, which hurts, and go sit in the recliner. ;)
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