Walking for Hope

Today the whole family walked in the Race for Hope in Washington DC, for my husbands friend who died of Brain Cancer last year. We had a huge team and raised over $11,000 for brain cancer research and it was really fun.

I had planned to run in the event, but 4 weeks ago I tore my calf muscle.  We had just had a March Madness event at my gym (Golds!), in which you had to complete 25 classes in the month of March. Being insane I decided to complete the classes in 3 weeks, as well as keep up with my running. I only run about 12 miles a week, but considering that I ran zero miles a week for the 42 years before that, it's a lot. So for 4 weeks I didn't have a day off from the gym and then on 4/3 at 8:00am Body Step class, my calf muscle tore!! So the moral of the story is warm up your calf muscles properly.

Anyway, it's about a 6-8 week recovery, with lots of physical therapy and exercises and major inconvenience. You can't do any cardio at all for the first two weeks when you are on crutches, so when I could limp into the gym, I decided to use the hand bike or the "fluid ergometer", and it's surprisingly difficult!! You really break into a sweat. And then when I eventually could get my heel to the ground I started using the Stair Master (which I never would have jumped on before), very very slowly, to do about 30 minutes of cardio. During the whole thing I was still able to do pilates, because a lot of that is core, you you are not using your legs or putting weight on them.

I've still got about 4 weeks to go until I can start running again, and it will be work to get back into shape.
It really makes you think about what you have been doing or not doing when you get an injury like that, and it also makes you discover new ways that you can work out. I had to completely grind to a halt for two weeks and then rethink the whole thing for upper body work outs and limited cardio. It's also difficult when you have lost a lot of weight, you immediately think that you are going to balloon out in two days and then have to start your weight loss all over again - which I'm happy to say didn't happen, because I went back to counting calories, and that is the best way to make sure you are under control if you can't exercise.