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Because sometime you just have to laugh through the pain. And if you
can't do that, laugh over here. You can't lose, really.
06/06/2004 - 06/13/2004
06/13/2004 - 06/20/2004
06/20/2004 - 06/27/2004
06/27/2004 - 07/04/2004
07/04/2004 - 07/11/2004
07/18/2004 - 07/25/2004
07/25/2004 - 08/01/2004
08/01/2004 - 08/08/2004
08/08/2004 - 08/15/2004
09/05/2004 - 09/12/2004
10/03/2004 - 10/10/2004
11/28/2004 - 12/05/2004
04/10/2005 - 04/17/2005
06/26/2005 - 07/03/2005
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Tuesday, April 12, 2005
TEN MONTHS.
It's been so long...
So, in the past four months since my last update, what have I been doing, knee-wise? Well, a little bit of slacking off, a little bit of hard work. First of all, the weightlifting.
When I last posted, I was pressing 260 pounds with both legs, or 180 with my right and 80 with my left. My main goal then was to get up to 300 pounds by the end of December. I actually managed that pretty easily. I was up to 310 by January 1st. Since then? Well... I kinda slacked off. Why? The funny thing is once you get about 75 percent of your strength back, you start to be able to do a lot of things you couldn't before. Stairs, hills, jogging... all of these are manageable, and as a consequence, you start to feel like you don't really need to be pressing quite so hard on the PT.
Now, this does NOT mean that I haven't been doing any kind of exercising at all. In fact, check out who's in 387th place in the 2005 Redbud Classic 5k run! Okay, so 387th out of 450 men isn't exactly burning up the course, but I wasn't really running to be competitive. It was more just to prove I could do it. Of course, NOW I have to show that I can get to a semi-competitive time (I say semi-competitive because I have no illusions about ever challenging the first place runner, a 24-year-old who finished 20 minutes faster than me).
As for taekwondo, I'm back, but only on a limited basis. Pivoting on my left leg feels funny, most likely because my muscle tone still isn't quite back yet. As a result, I can only do some of the kicks, and most of those can't be done at full power. Each week I get a little better, but I really need to get back in the gym and start lifting weights again to speed up the process.
The only other thing worth mentioning for now is knee stiffness. If I spend any amount of time sitting with my knee bent (like, say, working at my desk), it's hard to extend my leg fully for the first 10 or 20 steps. I actually asked Dr. Don about that and he told me that this stiffness was normal and would eventually go away. I don't want to say I like this condition, but it does keep me from leaping up and putting my knee in a precarious position, so for now it's okay. It doesn't hurt; it just feels weird.
So, that's the news at 10 months. It's funny to read back through the entries in this archive. I remember during a lot of those entries thinking that my knee would NEVER get better, and that three months was an eternity. Now it seems like it all just zipped by. Let those last two sentences sink in, future-ACL-surgery victims. You'll get verrrrry familiar with them.
Next update: oh... who knows? At the latest, I'll probably post something on the one-year anniversary in June. But if something notable happens between now and then, I'll let you know.
Updated at 11:14 PM
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