Knee injury.
Day Eleven
Seems like the rest helped some yesterday. My leg is feeling better. I think I might be getting a bit bored of writing about injury, since not much is happening with my leg.
I have not run in 12 days.
I have not swam, more than a few hundred yards, in 14 days.
Will I be able to swim across the lake, at least one more time, before the end of the season? I hope so.
Memorized Robert Frost’s “Out Out” after randomly encountering it while browsing poets.org. Reading the first line, “The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard” I remembered that I had memorized this poem in high school. Was it for English class or just on my own, during the summer when I memorized poems and then recited them in the Iowa cornfields while detassling corn?
Biked for 16 minutes in the front room, with my bike on a stand. Watched the 2009 5000 meter women’s world championships. Felt good. After I was done, walking seemed a bit easier. Still trying to avoid walking too much today. I’m planning to try swimming again this afternoon.
Went to the lake to swim. Hard to kick, still. Managed to swim 400 yards by kicking with one leg and dragging the other. Not sure if my knee will be okay before the end of open swim season, but even if I can’t swim, I can go to the lake to walk in the water. I can almost walk normally in the water. It’s calming, even when it’s freezing, which it was yesterday. Reminds me of the lines from Mary Oliver’s poem, “Swimming, One Day in August”: “It is time, now, I said/for the deepening and the quieting of the spirit/among the flux of happenings” and “I went down in the afternoon/to the sea/which held me, until I grew easy.”
Knee status: walking must closer to normal, still slow but even less limp-y than before, can’t do a flutter kick in water without pain, failed the straight leg raise again.
Treatment: RICE.