First Day Back At The Gym
One of the reasons I ultimately moved back to Chilliwack is because I wanted to sort of take a well deserved rest from the last ten years of my life. Basically since leaving high school, my life has been one non-stop rollercoaster ride. My time in Ottawa was spent doing 60 hour weeks mostly at work, and I don’t even really remember that period of my life. During my master’s degree I was doing lots of research at school, and I also did a part time job on the side to help pay some bills. My first few years at CounterPath were crazy hectic as well, and most of us spent the first few years of our employment there working six day work weeks (all of us worked through that entire summer when we started too).
Couple ten years of fatigue with two rounds of surgery, some hospital time, and a nasty hospital-acquired infection that took me six long months to get rid of, and you end up with how I was feeling a few months ago. Thankfully I’ve been feeling a lot better out here, and am slowly getting back to feeling like my old self. I’ve been trying to set a regular routine in my life, and ultimately that’s allowed me to get to bed at a reasonable hour. It was pretty rare for me to be in bed before 1:30am or so in Vancouver, but out here I’ve been trying to crawl in around 11pm or so.
There are a few good reasons why I moved into the current area where I live in Chilliwack. One of them is that it’s only about a 5 minute drive from Cultus Lake, which should make camping in the summer fairly easy. Another reason is that it’s close to all the old bike trails I used to ride down when I was a kid, and my tentative plan is to pick up a nice mountain bike again in the summer. And lastly, my current apartment is literally about a 90 second walk to the YMCA. So today I finally walked down and picked up a membership.
I just got back from my first workout, and I have to say, it feels pretty good being sore again. I’ve actually hurt myself quite a few times since being a young adult, and I have a lot of injuries I need to baby. I ripped my quad when I was 18 playing rugby, and that still bothers me from time to time. The injury that causes me the most pain though is a rather recent knee injury I had while doing the West Coast Trail years ago. For those of you that reminder, I actually hurt my knee fairly badly on the third day of the trip. I debated getting airlifted off the trail, but my friends (thankfully) split up the contents of my pack and helped me continue on. We all took a full day of rest on the trail to help my knee heal, but ultimately it was the tylenol 3’s I started chewing that let me finish the trail.
I spent the next two weeks barely being able to walk, and it would be six full weeks later that I would ultimately be able to walk without a limp. Even today, my knee still flares up from time to time, as it did about 30 minutes ago while on the elliptical machine. I never got an official diagnosis about how bad I hurt it, but I suspect I tore or damaged the ACL in my knee. So at least for now, I’m going to baby it a bit and see if I can slowly re-strengthen it over time.
I’m hoping to start waking up and going to the gym in the mornings, so we’ll see how that ultimately works. Depending on how sore I am tomorrow, I’m going to try and go Monday, Wednesday and Friday at first, and see how that goes. I’d like to say I’ll be going all five weekdays, but given that I’m not really a morning person, I know that’s basically impossible at this point.