I’m just gonna keep saying the ugly parts outloud here until I get all the ugly out. (Ugly crying on the side likely included.) I hope I won’t permanently alienate any of you by bloodletting here. (Mom, you’re legally bound to me and Kim you’ve sworn partnership for life so you’re both stuck.) 

This week I had my first follow up with the orthopedist since the diagnosis (compression side femoral neck stress fracture) and it went in some ways better than expected (feared) and in other ways worse. I may or may not have spent a good (bad?) chunk of the week leading up to my appointment stalking old blogs and message boards about FNSF trying to get a bead on what to expect as next steps, wanting to feel prepared for whatever news I might get. The unexpected sentence of eight weeks on crutches had stunned me and left me a sobby puddle and I wasn’t looking to repeat that meltdown.

The day of my follow up marked seven weeks and two days (but who’s counting) since the diagnosis and the internet had me scared I might be looking at another four to six weeks on crutches. But my message board friends also had me optimistic that at least I’d be allowed to start swimming and cycling and even ellipticaling. (You know this whole experience has fundamentally altered me as the latter is not something Liz of 5 months ago would have looked forward to.) Lots of online hip fracturers reported being allowed to do those things within four to six weeks of their diagnosis and here I was at 7.285714 weeks – surely some exercise was in my immediate future!

I limped in with all this internet “knowledge” rattling around my oft-concussed skull, optimistically dreading my appointment and here’s where I am now: I can start walking a bit on my own but I have two more weeks on the crutches for most of my getting around needs. And still no training until PT starts mid-February. No real swimming, no bike, no elliptical, no nada. 

I was relieved to get to try walking unaided, but so let down at the same time. I wanted a workout more than a stroll. The news from my doctor was the exact opposite of what I’d prepared myself to hear. After my appointment I recruited some coworkers and elatedly walked (awkwardly shuffled because I can’t actually remember how to walk) a block to lunch and back; then got back to my office and felt immediately depressed again that I still can’t even sit on a bike or kick a few hundred meters in the pool. (I honestly cannot believe how strongly this has made me feel about swimming.) It’s hard to weather more disappointment – even when tempered by good news. 

With the doctor’s tentative blessing I got briefly in the water (no kicking and did a total of 4 minutes of actual swimming!) to feel things out over the weekend and continued practicing “walking” a few minutes at a time. And now, after heeding her words to be very conservative and put minimal stress on the hip, it’s aching. And I’m back to mental spiraling.

It doesn’t hurt to put weight on it; and I didn’t feel anything in the pool. It’s not a bad pain (I don’t even know if I would call it pain or more an awareness of my hip) but I’ve had some evening achiness Saturday and Sunday as I just sit, dinner, Netflix, and put myself to sleep. I know some achiness is to be expected as muscles and bones that have gone untaxed for months are asked to pick up a little bit of slack, but I’m terrified that I’m backsliding and that this is just the beginning and I’ll actually never heal all the way. I’ve experienced every emotion on the spectrum three or four times over between Thursday and Sunday and I’m exhausted. 

As I (think? guess? I) am healing physically, I can’t escape the thought that, damn, mentally this thing gets worse and worse. I thought the first day would be the lowest of this journey’s lows, and I guess it probably was the most acutely terrible I’ve felt. After my diagnosis and tearful first day on crutches my mood did improve, marginally. I’ve noted that the waterworks mercifully ran dry by day two for instance. But I mentally plateaued by the halfway point and have regressed into gloom a little more each day since.

How I hate this “healing” process. So let me count the ways. 

This will be my last blog-in-list-form for a while, I promise. (I think.) (I know) I’ve quite exhausted the format and need to move on. (I also know that people love lists [you simpletons] so just think of this as the buzzfeed [buzzkill] of sports blogs.)

Today’s self-loathing list inventories the myriad ways in which things get worse before they get better. Assuming they ever do. (I warned you I was purging the ugly, right?) Hopefully my bones are indeed regrowing under my thin skin, (only still-thin thing about me) but I can’t actually see that physical progress. What I can observe is my mental/emotional state and things on that front(al lobe) have deteriorated consistently since that negligible serotonin spike after day one. 

Oof. Ok here goes. 

I’m getting slower while everyone else gets faster.

I’m falling further and further behind in my fitness and getting it back seems more and more impossible. Several encounters with stairwells and attempted one-legged push-ups have broadcast to me how very out of shape I am. And not like offseason out of shape, but actual get a stern word from your primary care physician out of shape. Sure there are different points in the race cycle where we’re more or less fit, but I generally always maintain a baseline, and it took years to develop that fitness floor. A race cycle may be a few months of dedicated workouts in support of a specific goal but it took years to get to a place where I could always swimbikerun x number of miles at x pace. And now two sedentary months (not to mention the two months prior to the crutches without running) seem to have wiped that slate clean.

In the eight years since I started really running and the seven since I started triathlon-ing I’ve consistently improved year after year. Every season that I get a little faster is the accumulation of every season that came before it. I’ve never taken months off. Is this going to set me back to a 2016, 2014, or even 2011 version of me? Approaching my recovery and getting back to some sort of training plan doesn’t feel like a matter of weeks or even months, it feels like I have years to make up, and that’s hard to wrap my mind around. 

And all the while, everyone around me is getting faster. I’m losing weeks or months or maybe years of hard work and the people I race with (and against) are logging the miles and the workouts that are making them better. Better than they were, better than I was, better than I’ll be. I said before I don’t know if I can do this sport if I’m not competitive at it, and from where I sit (and sit and sit and sit) I’m looking at a season (if I even get a season) at the back of the pack.

And there is nothing wrong with the back of the pack! But when you get to know yourself as one kind of competitor how do you get to know yourself another way? For better or worse our identities get wrapped up in how we perform. Will I recognize myself or like myself if I go from chasing Boston and Kona and Team USA to, well to not doing those things? 

I’m getting fatter and softer.

As I said on the ‘gram I’m not fishing here so please don’t respond that I look fine and oh you didn’t notice. That’s not the point. The point is that I notice. I’m the one who can’t zip my pants. (Colleagues, please don’t look too closely or you’ll realize I’m recycling the same two work bottoms that still kind of fit day after day.) I’m the one who knows what I look like naked and I can’t stand it.  

 I didn’t get into this sport for the aesthetics (please reference my Hudson mustache and weird brown sweat stains if you don’t believe me) but I have gotten used to my body looking and feeling a certain way and I’ve unabashedly enjoyed my body looking and feeling that way. (I’ve also tailored my wardrobe to fit that body’s dimensions, hence the work wardrobe woes.) Now I don’t fit into a lot of my clothes and I’ve got flesh hanging over the sides of my pants in unwelcome, uncomfortable ways. (I’m literally sitting and typing with my pants unzipped right now for comfort.)

If you’re skeptical that I could have put on that much weight in two months I’ll remind you that it has been four since I’ve run so I was already not my slimmest when the crutches happened. Then let me be clear: I have been sitting for almost eight weeks. I’ve worked from home when I can or where the weather has forced me (crutches plus snow is a bad combination) and I have gone days at a time transitioning from bed to couch and back to bed without ever seeing the outside or more than a hundred “steps”. All in the service of putting as little strain on my hip as possible, giving it every opportunity to recover. While I sat though, my appetite remained triathlete-voracious. I went from incinerating thousands of calories a day to maybe 1200, but no one told my belly to stop being hungry all the time and so I sat, and I ate, and I expanded. 

When I’ve expressed this particular frustration to friends many have been dismissive or made me feel like a vain shitty person. It’s not crazy that I care about this. It doesn’t make me a bad person; it makes me an average 21st century American woman. So I don’t know who I am as an athlete any more, and I don’t know who I am as a corporeal human being taking up (too much) space. 

The crutches hurt.

They rub my ribs, my left leg is tired, and my right glute is screaming tight. The worst has unexpectedly been the palms of my hands. If I have to crutch a lot for work (or to satisfy a sheer stubborn need to be out and about,) the next day I can barely stand to wrap my hands around the sticks. Insult to injury: I got pads to ease the pain under my arms, but because I have pediatric crutches (no joke, my set is tiny for people under 5′) they don’t fit perfectly so my choice is between chafed ribs or wobbly under-arms. (I’ve opted for the latter.)

I  get more, not less, bored.

Doing nothing is boring. The first week of doing nothing is boring, but kind of nice. The second week of doing nothing is more boring, but you assume you’ll find a way to manage and entertain yourself. The eighth week of doing nothing is a type boring that becomes a physical sensation. It’s how I imagine it would feel to be possessed, but without the fun head spinning poltergeisty side effects.  

The migraines. They came back.

It took a few weeks for them to reemerge – the first month I thought, ‘hey! I worried for no reason!’ But the last couple weeks I’ve started to get the familiar shooting pains traversing the right side of my back up through my skull and into my right eye socket. And the nausea and light sensitivity. And the vertigo. And days in a row of pain that just sits behind my eyebrows with apparently nowhere to be and no remedy. They’re not full force yet, but if this torpid existence doesn’t change soon I know they will be. I’ll be back to crying in a dark room 4-5 nights a week. The fix is so simple: to move, every day. To be active and exert myself physically. Such a simple toll, such a hefty price if I don’t pay it. THIS NEEDS TO END. 

Digestion!

Return readers of this blog may not believe that I’m really quite regular! Even as I torture my tummy with daily doses of hot sauce and have indulged in home cooking and street meat from questionable purveyors on every corner of the earth. It turns out my easygoing digestive system (race mornings excluded) relies on lots of moving to keep things moving. I’m gonna break with oversharing tradition here and skip the details but despite efforts to eat well, including lots of fiber, I have been uncomfortable these last months. You would think my increasingly constricting waistbands could squeeze things along but apparently I’m just destined to discomfort around and through my middle section for the time being. 

That bitch irony.

This whole predicament has been marked by hillaaaaarious bouts of irony and the universe being a downright (but sooooo funny) bitch. Here’s a noncomprehensive list within a list of hysterical coincidences and catches 22 that have added a spicy dash of vindictive to this experience. 

First and foremost, 60 to zero: About a week before my diagnosis I had lunch with Coach Josh, during which we had a come-to-yeezus talk about my 2019. I explained that I wasn’t fucking around anymore. I’ve felt like I was training and performing at around 75% the past couple seasons and I was ready to get down to business and make serious progress on my Kona dreams. He agreed to the two full Ironmans I’d registered for (Lake Placid and Arizona) and was ready to push me hard. We agreed my goal was a top ten finish at one or both, and depending how things were looking in the spring, maybe even a podium. I was ready to fight, to make the sacrifices required. And a few days later I was sidelined for the foreseeable future, and maybe forever. 

In service of rededicating myself to my tri-goals right after my heart-to-heart with Josh I invested in a (pricey) pack of classes at Swimbox. My first few classes there had been really helpful and I was finally ready to, ahem, dive in and see real swim gains. I laid down some dollars to keep myself honest and committed through the winter doldrums, scheduled several months of classes, and basically immediately thereafter was told no nothing, not even swimming. 

The very day I was diagnosed I received an email with exciting participant information for the 2019 Boston Marathon, a race I knew was no longer in the cards the instant the doc said the words “stress fracture.” (Fortunately a few days after that I also got an email with instructions on how and when to cancel my hotel reservation to avoid fees.)

Two days later the new Speed Sherpa Betty Designs kits I’d been waiting so excitedly for finally arrived. Just in time to have no reason to wear them.

The following week I received great news from Wahoo that they would be replacing my defective smart trainer for free so that I could get after my winter workouts. They’ve pressed pause on that reorder since I have no use for an expensive piece of workout equipment right now. 

I’ve tried to cut down on things I know cause bone density problems, like my inhaler (breathing is overrated) and antacids (despite all the hot sauce and tummy troubles) and now caffeine! But caffeine is one of the few things that helps with the migraines. I cut diet coke cold turkey years ago to help prevent more stress fractures, but now to survive this stress fracture I’ve had to take it back up.   

My misanthropy grows.

I perversely feel less empathetic towards others. Not all others, I swear I haven’t lost perspective that many people have it far worse. But for those who don’t, and who complain, I can’t roll my eyes hard enough. People who moan about a few days sickness, or a week they have to take off running for a strained muscle, or even a few weeks off running or biking but they can still swim or lift; to all of it I think, ‘oh shut the fuck up!’ It recently took all the restraint I had left – not in high supply even when healthy – to not lay into a guy who complained on a triathlon FB group that the flu had kept him from training almost a week and oh he was so worried about the fitness he’d lost in those seven days away. Another martyr responded that he too had been sidelined sick for four days earlier and had then taken another few days really easy – only 45-60 minutes of training each – and he’d bounced right back! I think I guffawed out loud at that. Not laughed – guffawed. These jags were losing it from a couple days away. Hell they probably lost weight having the flu! LUCKY!  

Maybe this is giving me a healthy dose of added perspective to carry back into tri-life if ever I get back to it. A few months ago I might have stressed about a couple days or a week away too. (Eh maybe not.) Staring down the barrel of a yearlong recovery, stressing about a day or a week here and there now seems like an absurd luxury. 

If I can impart anything useful at all to my readers, please take this as permission to CALM DOWN. Take a step back from whatever has you rounding third to crazytown and be grateful for the fleeting nature of your malady. Conversely, next time you need inspiration to heed your 5am wakeup or to drag yourself to the pool when it’s cold or dark out, remember your own temporary frustration and remember me somewhere probably still just sitting, expanding. 

I hate sounding so negative and mean towards others pursuing the sport we all love. Friends, I am still cheering you on, I swear. I see people I care about making progress, having great races, running their first marathons, making big gains, and I am genuinely happy for them. I’m angry about my situation and loss, but I don’t begrudge others their successes or wish this on anyone else.

Just as I won’t begrudge my friends their wins, I hope you (mom, Kim, anyone else who read this far) will stay patient with me while I continue to navigate this slow, punishing road back. As I get to inch towards some degree of physical normalcy again, I’m already struck that the mental game hasn’t gotten any easier. Two painful unstable steps forward  seem to precede one to four leaps back every time.