I missed running in these SO much!

A week ago I was crying into my herbal tea because I didn’t think I was ever going to be getting back into the gym or running again, or even walking any great distances, but here I am…

Two nights post-ortho green light I have DOMS (delayed onset muscle soreness) so bad I can barely move, logged over 11K steps from work yesterday, and actually got my ass back on the treadmill and managed to JOG…Yes, I jogged…for a whole 7 minutes, but it was seven minutes longer than I’ve jogged over the past 2 months!

Once I got the okay to be on the foot, I decided that it was time to shadow some of my new team, so yesterday afternoon I was all over the hospital, learning how to move patients, set the brakes on wheel chairs, plug in Stryker beds, get up with nurses for hand-off communications, and I even got to push a bed WITH a patient in it. Good thing there was another Transporter leading the way, because who knows how many times I would have smacked that door frame getting that bed back into the room. The girls ran me ragged, but it was good to be up and about.

I got home and knew it was time to suck it up and go into the weight room. It’s so pretty now, all girly with the black chair rail, the new shelves, and the speakers for my favorite Spotify lifting play lists.

My chalk-board decals with current PR’s…

I pretty much knew my lower body numbers were going to be embarrassingly horrible. I figured I’d struggle to squat 5×5 with just the 45 pound bar, but I actually did a set at 45 and a set at 50, and thought, “hell, I can probably eek out 55…” and I did. That is NOT to say that my thighs didn’t feel like Jell-O, or that I didn’t get a muscle cramp on the inside of my thigh. Those things totally happened. For the first time ever, I benched more than I squatted. When I looked at my log from before the fall, I was squatting 105, dead-lifting 165, and benching a respectable 80 pounds. Yesterday, I was so not that impressive, but I can’t whine, because it’d been about ten weeks since I did any kind of lower body lifting, and I’d done one upper body lift since the fall, so at 5×5, I nailed squats @ 55#, bench @ 60#, and deads @ 85#. Yeah, not impressive, but it was still more than I’d picked up in all those weeks, soooo….

I know, too, that I must’ve done SOMETHING right, because I had planned on shadowing at work today for a little while, but was so stiff, I wasn’t even going to try, so I stopped in and talked with my team for a little while, asking questions and brainstorming for a bit before I came home and flaked out on the couch.

I let the dogs out and walked around the pool a few times and felt like the stretch made my thighs, hammies and glutes feel a whole lot better, so I put my running shoes on and hit the treadmill for about a half an hour. I set the incline to about 4%, and the speed to 3.5 mph, and then thought, what the hell? I have to try some time, so I bumped the speed up to 4.5 mpg and jogged for a bit. It hurt a little toward the end, so the feet gave out before I got winded, but I figure that was still more than I did yesterday, soooo…

Kind of amazing how things can turn around in 7 days time…and my take-away from this whole stupid “falling over a dog and breaking a body part” situation is that patience is a virtue and while it doesn’t happen over night, that I WILL heal at some point.

So, mentally? I feel 100% better, because exercise had been my stress reliever, and I really missed endorphins. Tomorrow? Try to get 5 more pounds on the bar for more squats, do another compound 5×5 session, and maybe even get my Zumba on, because my wonderful sister got me a new Zumba workout disc for Christmas and I haven’t been able to use it yet, soooo…

Besides…Rob…If I’m ever going to rock that Princess Leia costume we talked about, I need to get after it. 😉

Until Next Time…