One month on

It is one month to the day since I last ran. This is not a good thing.

Nothing really to report. Nothing much has changed over the week. Sometimes I think it's improving, then I realise it isn't. Ah well. Maybe next week...

Gnome

It's life Jim, but not as we know it...

Things got a bit ugly there this week. For some reason on Monday night, my back went entirely cactus, to the extent that the only way I could move on Tuesday (and I only tried it once) was by crawling. Lots of pain killers, no effect. Couldn't stand, couldn't sit, could only lie in one position (foetal). Not good. Getting to the Hospital on Wednesday wasn't fun, but at least I found that I could sit in the car seat for some reason. The procedure itself turned out to be essentially painless, but I had to lie completely still and on my front (which, as it wasn't my good friend the foetal position, was in itself rather painful). Added to all that, I stupidly lay with my good ear on the pillow, so that with the noise of the CT scanner, I couldn't hear the doctor & nurse. You should have seen me go through the roof when they unexpectedly slapped some cold betadine in the middle of my back! :-) I'm sure they do it just for fun.


Wednesday evening - no improvement. Thinking that it's all a waste of effort. I'm not impatient; really I'm not! :-)
Thursday morning - hmmm, I seem to be able to stretch a bit and sit up a bit.
Thursday evening - wow, I can walk to the other end of the house (provided I sit down again immediately).
Friday morning - gets own breakfast. Sits in office chair mostly comfortably for a couple of hours (working, unfortunately). Gets own lunch, but finds that there is still a limit to how long I can stand up (which is unfortunately shorter than it takes to make lunch).

OK. I'm still not particularly patient, but I'm trying to view it as a race where I've started at the back. I've already caught up to the sitters and I'm starting to make inroads on the standers. After that the walkers, then... Hey, it's all good :-)

Gnome

New Blogger Test

If you got this, then you're seeing posts from the new blogger. Welcome to the new world ;-)

Gnome

Short anatomy lesson

Here's a sad ol' picture for you...



...my back.

The yellow line is a normal disk, the blue line is "medium to severe degeneration of L5/S1" and the red line is a "moderate disk extrusion at L4/L5". What that all means in layman's language is that the 'red' disk is pushing through onto my spinal chord, producing all sorts of sharp pains down my left leg when I'm vertical. I'm not keen on waiting the 6 months that it will (may) take to resolve itself, so I'm having cortisone injections next week which should get me comfortably vertical in about a week, though not yet running for some undefined time after that. I'm also assured that the procedure and its immediate aftermath is extremely painful, so I can't exactly say that I'm looking forward to it.

Anyhow, the short term result of all this is that I withdrew from 6ft on Friday, and I have no idea when I will run competitively again. Ah well, better go and log on to CoolSwimming... :-)

Gnome

p.s. looks like this is the last post to the old version of blogger. I'll post a brief test post to the new version in a little while. If you're using bloglines and you see this one but you don't see the next, then please go and manually re-subscribe. When I re-subscribed the other day to some of the other recalcitrants who have only just been pushed kicking and screaming to the new blogger, I found that I had to pick the last 'feed' on the list to get it to work. The first 'feed' was apparently still pointing to the old blogger. Good luck! :-)

Speaking of Tiger Angel

We travelled to the regatta centre this morning at the much more sleep-friendly time of 6:30 for the All Womens' Triathlon (along with Cheri & Rachel - CR's wildthing and mouse - and their doting entourages). Tiger angel has been quietly and slowly ramping things up, so while she's still only up to the enticer length (250/10k/2.5k), she was really relaxed going into it, and with good reason.

We don't know the times yet (if ever - tri NSW was the organiser, and they don't have a history of being particularly well organised :-) ) because both of us forgot to start our watches, and the various waves went off at random times. However, by looking at the time stamps on photos that I took at the start and end, it appears that she's pulled another 30 seconds or so off last month's record breaker! What's far, far better though is that when she finished, she just sat down and started chatting about the race and all the things that had happened like she'd just been for a stroll around the park with friends.

Talk about stoked! It was only the other day that I said to her "I can't wait for the day that you can go for an hour's run and then say 'That was fun. Well, what's next?'", and only a few days later, here we are. The strategy has been for a long slow redevelopment, but it is clearly paying off in spades, so there's no reason to go changing it now.

Anyhow, no tri report would be complete without a photo, so here's the water exit.

The curse of Dr Kuah...

Actually, there's no curse; I just like the sound of the title :-)

I'm off to the aforementioned doctor tomorrow for scans to make sure that I don't have a bulging disk or something like that. Something is playing havoc with the nerves running down my left leg, making life generally less than comfortable. I feel fine when I'm sitting, but unfortunately no one ever got terribly fit by sitting a lot! In the last couple of days, I've had a few good hours, so maybe things are settling down. So, till I know what's happening, I'll just keep swimming (wasn't it lucky that after all these years, I'd finally plucked up the courage to ask to be taught just before this all happened) and we'll wait...

Gnome

p.s. Of course, the worst part of this is that I can't, in all good conscience, whinge about it after all that tiger angel has been through. That doesn't mean that I don't whinge; it just means that I can't do it in good conscience ;-) :-)

Now, speaking of tiger angel...