Elephantiasis of the Knees

Eww and ouch.

I haven't a clue as to why this happens. I went out for my run, taking the old familiar route because I wasn't able to get to my run before 5 (because I had to pick the dog up from daycare. Yes, really. www.dogdaysatlanta.com). With the new route I must be more careful about the time of day I run, so that route was scrapped for yesterday. Off I went, pleased to be running but cold and a bit agitated at having to run later.

I have re-run the route in my head and cannot find anything about yesterday's run that was out of the ordinary, but my knees tell a very different story. I tried to take a picture with my phone to better illustrate the enormity of my left knee, but the puny megapixels in the camera make the shot seem grainy and I'm unable to get a proper angle. If I'm able to snap a decent one later I'll post it and revise my blog.

The question I need answered is why. Why does this happen on some days and not on others? It makes no sense to me.

Now, to be clear about my body's baseline for beginning running I should take a moment to jot down what the poor bod has gone through. I should also probably admit, at least to myself, that I expected major joint problems in my life, though I expected them much later - when I'm OLD. 38 is NOT old, gawddammit!

A quick 'n dirty of my body's physical past: (1) ballet ongoing from age 3-17, including pointe from age 11; (2) soccer for a couple of years; (3) gymnastics for a year; (4) track for a year (5) aerobics age 18-23; I taught aerobics for a few years in this time frame; (6) after doing nothing for about 3-4 years I returned to step aerobics to lose 2nd baby weight and began teaching again and kept that up for 2 years; (7) Taekwondo 4.5 years; (8) nothing for 3-4 years and then began karate and did that for one year until a partial rotator cuff tear and finally (9) running.

It's likely that the 14 years of dance was my downfall, followed by the aerobics and martial arts, all of which put undue stress on feet, muscles, joints, etc. It's funny that sports are encouraged at such a young age, with no one ever mentioning the fact that if you stick with a sport seriously for any length of time and suffer injuries (which one cannot escape if training for years and years), then the body will indeed pay for that later; assuming, of course, that the injuries are not serious enough to halt the sport completely at the time.

I suppose that if we're told at age 3 or 4 that we have an affinity for x or y sport and must continue to work hard and train constantly, but "later, when you're a mommy you might have trouble walking sometimes because your knees will hurt so much and your back and neck will probably bother you a lot too," then we might not continue. I'm not sure if I would have forged ahead or not. Obviously at age 3-4 I was unable to make such decisions and those were made for me. But later I was a semi-pro ballerina (read: trained all the time, part of a ballet company, tickets to performances were expensive, dancers got paid ZERO) and at that time it was all I cared about. I had dreams of going to NY to continue and move forward. Alas, the mother and father units needed more control over me than that - and neither was willing to cough up the dough that would have been required for such - so they sent me to one of the state universities and chose my major for me. Hint: it wasn't dance.

Good god can I go off on a tangent or what?! And all that was just to get around to admitting that going into this running gig I was already damaged goods. I suppose I was trying to explain myself to the 4 people who actually READ my ramblings.....

Note to self: go off on work tangent tomorrow. Key words for tomorrow's work tangent: sexual harrassment, arrogance, disrespectfulness, moodiness, racist, sexist, god complex.....and much much more!