I suppose having a rarely taken recovery day today is as good a time as any to share the little shop of horrors known as my hip. My left hip to be more exacting. How does a 46 year old woman break a hip? In some ways I would love to say it was horrible osteoporosis or some whacked out bone defect. The reality is it was none of those things. It stemmed from my subconscious thought of "if one is good, two are better". This is a phrase that can be applied to a multitude of situations. Two dollars are better than one, my former self probably believed two donuts were better than one..... Well I came to believe somewhere last summer that if I can do one OTF class in a day, I surely could do two. I had already lost about 40 pounds by then and the gains were more and more obvious. So, there I was. Two classes a day. Morning and night. Lots and lots of laundry happening there....have never accumulated so many sets of sweaty clothes.
Then it happened. I was challenged to a stepping duel. The fitness tracker type. One week. Most steps wins. Well....what I came to know about myself is I hate to lose. I mean HATE. My challenger hates it too. So there I was. OTF at least once a day. Trail walking about 2-4 miles a day some
days and still behind. My hip started hurting. By the end of the week I had accumulated over 104,000 steps to still come in second. Not sure what was hurt more. My hip of my pride. Probably the second but that is a story for another day. That hip pain would keep me off running or walking for two months. I became proficient at the stationary bike at OTF and ultimately it got better. Being in medicine I decided it was just a bursitis from overuse. About six weeks after that I aggravated it again running on inclines. Later I would slip in the house. I never hit the ground. I never fell per se, just slipped. That would lead to a very long six weeks of difficulty walking and crutches before my stubborn self finally gave in for an X-ray. The XRay would show the head of my femur had completely snapped off. For my medical peeps that would be a displaced femoral neck fracture. I was in surgery two days later getting a fairly intimidating compression screw placed.
What followed was two weeks on the couch, six weeks total of crutches and some time for a difficult reflection on the notion that two may not always be better than one. The pain in the beginning had been a stress fracture. The pain when I slipped was one of the biggest bones in my body coming apart.
Now.....I did not stop working out. Ten days after surgery I was cleared to go back to the gym for upper body. Yep. Ended up crutching into the regular gym and fighting off the old ladies on the arm bike doing their cardiac rehab. If gutting out the humiliation of fighting off said old ladies and surviving ten miles on the arm bike does not build character I am not sure what does. For me, I learned that I cannot bull doze my way to fitness by adding more and more. I can trust the process and take recovery when I need at. Thanks to a particularly hard workout of inclines today is that day. Will there be fear that magically I will go backwards and lose all my gains before my class tomorrow afternoon? Of course, as history has taught us, my line of logic on fitness and health has the accuracy of a funhouse mirror.
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