Very Venturous

Tag: fit

  • Training for a Marathon after Hip Surgery

    Training for a Marathon after Hip Surgery

    No one ever imagines having to one day deal with chronic injury which incapacitates and alters your life in a major way. No one can be prepared to deal with unexpected trauma, or life incidents which throw us in a position where we suddenly have absolutely zero control.

    This was my reality when my hip injury and accident happened – absolute disbelief, fear, denial, and panic. The whole world suddenly felt foreign and displaced. I couldn’t run anymore. The very thing which was holding my life together yet simultaneously destroying me, evaporated into thin air, in a chance instance.

    The Background.
    It was August 2014 when I fell off a ditch and tore cartilage in my right hip. I weighed just under 40 kilos. I had spent the summer in what felt like a drug induced cloud. Coffee, fruit, running, sleep. I was working on a campsite in the south of France, where I had worked the summer before. I have only fabulous memories of that first summer, filled with spirit and freedom, when my issues with food and weight and exercise had eased a bit, and my thoughts were otherwise occupied.

    It turned out to be just a pause, though, and the year following that summer, exercise addiction got real, and I deteriorated, slowly. When I went back to the campsite to work another season the following summer 2014, the experience was very different. I didn’t feel fit or healthy, and I didn’t feel happy either.

    This context is definitely relevant to everything that followed – the injury, hip surgery, and the journey to the half-marathon. For so long, I was addicted to the high of running and feeling starved. If everything else in my life suffered in order for me to remain in that zone, then so be it.

    Things had started off really well at the campsite at the beginning of the summer actually, with the excitement of returning to old friends and faces, the beautiful Dordogne, meeting new people, enjoying the simplicity of seasonal work and spending evenings drinking and singing in the dorm common room. But before long I was just too tired for any of it. I didn’t care, and I suddenly hated everything and everyone.

    The Injury.
    I was out on my usual run one afternoon on a path in the woods, one week before my flight back to Ireland, when an enormous dog appeared and catapulted towards me rather viciously – I’m a fast runner, but that kind of situation puts you into panic/flight mode, and I tripped and fell off the side of the cliff edging the path. It wasn’t like I fell off the side of a mountain or anything, but it was a very steep drop, and I landed badly. The pain was excruciating. The dog couldn’t reach me where I’d fallen, and I somehow managed to drag myself back to the campsite, bawling my eyes out. 

    By the time we arrived at the hospital I was convinced I’d broken my hip – I knew straight away anyway that something was very, very wrong, and this wasn’t a slight injury or sprain. Personal injury lawyers are experts in handling car accident and slip-and-fall cases. In cases of auto accidents, make sure to consult with a Michigan car accident lawyer. The x-ray showed no broken bones though, and I left on crutches. I arrived in Dublin airport in a wheelchair. My Mum was altogether horrified when she saw me, and of course we had a lovely screaming match in the car on the way home. If you’re looking for a Milwaukee personal injury attorney to help you file an accident claim, you may contact Martin Law Office. People who also need regular medical treatments or therapy because of an injury may need to look for a clinic that utilizes ABA Therapy Billing solutions to make sure that your bills and insurance documents are processed correctly and efficiently. Consult a medical negligence lawyer in California to understand your rights after suffering from substandard medical care.

    Physio to Surgery.
    I explain the recovery process in more detail in my Youtube video. Basically, throughout the following year of physio, the only exercise I could do was cycling or the elliptical. Walking was painful, and at the same time I developed gastroparesis and could barely eat. Doctors thought I had a stress fracture in my femur, before a specific x-ray showed torn cartilage. This was in New York, and I was advised to try more physio before thinking about surgery, as this was a last resort and probably wouldn’t help that much anyway.

    A year after the accident, I saw a specialist in Dublin, told him I was fed up, and wanted surgery. They did another x-ray, where ink is injected into your hip joint to highlight the area. From the results, surgery was scheduled for the following month.

    So I had the surgery. It involved dislocating my hip from my joint, and cutting away the torn cartilage. Cartilage can’t heal itself, and the pain was being caused by the torn piece flapping against the joint (or something like that), so all they could do was clean up the joint area and cut away the damaged cartilage. The immediate recovery process was extremely painful. I had an extremely negative outlook on the whole situation and was throughly convinced I would be stuck like this for life.

    I roamed the internet and Facebook groups for stories about this injury and other people’s recoveries, and THIS WAS THE WORST THING I could have done – everything I found confirmed my worst fears: there was no hope, I had to accept that I would never run or play sport at an intense level again. My surgeon himself told me I probably wouldn’t run more than 5km distances again in my life. I was devastated.

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    Rehab.
    The rehab process involved lots of strength training using resistance bands and bodyweight exercises, as well as swimming and cycling. In February 2016, 18 months after the injury, I stepped back on the treadmill. But I didn’t want to to push it, so from then on kept my treadmill runs to under 6km. I soon picked up sprinting, and found that this type of training and movement really helped strengthen and recondition the muscles supporting my hip area. I also looked into non-invasive stem cell therapy.

    I honestly believe that the most important part of my recovery process was the enormous amount of cycling I did that year. Cycling is fantastic for any joint-related injury – I remember watching cyclists in France who were at least 60 years old, flying along with no problem. I attempted a long run that summer, up and down a mountain in Chiang Mai, totalling 21km – it was an extremely stupid thing to do, and I was pretty crippled for a few months afterwards, and didn’t run again until towards the end of 2016.

    I started cycling in Thailand in June 2016. I had never cycled a road bike before in my life, but spent the next few months really clocking up the miles. We did some crazy cycles up the highest and steepest mountains in Thailand, and I was averaging 500km a week at one stage. I cycled the Cote d’Azur, across Bali, through the Adelaide Hills, and used my bike as transport in Sydney and Melbourne. My running involved sprint intervals on the treadmill – I never ran outside, still dealing with some sort of fear and reluctance perhaps as a result of the accident.

    Endurance Running: Half-Marathon Training
    Today, I live in New York, and I’m training for the Brooklyn half-marathon this May 2018. Towards the end of last year I realised that sprint training was no longer working for me at all. I started to experiment and change my workouts, and started to do more research and reading into endurance running, and how to train my muscles, metabolism, and aerobic system. I felt dramatic changes, very quickly, and decided that maybe it was time to think about competing. So I signed up for the half-marathon, and here I am.

    I don’t experience any pain when I run. However, I am very conscious of my limits, and extremely careful and self-aware when it comes to my hip and how I execute certain movements. Soccer, for example, is out of the question for me now (I used to play soccer at a competitive level throughout my early teens). Technically, running should be too, but I’ve fought stubbornly to not only regain my fitness and athletic strength, but to surpass all my previous running capabilities. I’m still not 100% sure of my relative potential, but I’m looking forward to running outside again soon with a few running clubs and entering a few more races this year! I’m currently running 30 – 40 miles per week, as well as two yoga classes per week.

    Dealing with injury is not easy. I get many questions on my Youtube videos about how to deal with it, and I’m still thinking about how to provide some sort of helpful answer to this. Because the truth is, behind the details, I didn’t deal with it well at all. I’m certainly in a far better place right now, and excited to keep exercise in my life with a new perspective. I’ll definitely be keeping this topic in mind for further blog posts!

  • Moving to New York City: Life After Travel

    Moving to New York City: Life After Travel

    I move out of my apartment today. This is the first time I’ve rented my own place, the first time I’ve been on a lease, the first time I’ve experienced the horror of parting with enormous chunks of my hard-earned money to “pay the bills” every month. It feels incredibly unfair to have to go through this to merely survive (I also feel as if I must be the only person in the world who has to do it).

    The lease transfer is on the table. After lunch, I’ll bleach my bathroom floor and hoover my room.

    I’m flying back to Ireland next weekend.

    It’s difficult to know where to begin with this post. I’ve had words and phrases spinning, flitting and spitting through my brain the past few months, but they always escape and disappear like wasted potential. Opportunity costs chirp away in my ear, constantly.

    I’ve been dealt a dismal and disappointing blow recently, which I may explain sometime later, but it’s irrelevant to this post because what I want to talk about now is how I feel about leaving Australia and going back home.

    Calm. Relief.

    Don’t get me wrong: I’m not moving back to live in Ireland. It will be a visit. A few practical reasons for my deciding to return at this time: I’m exhausted and want to collapse immovable somewhere cosy for a very long nap, I actually miss my family, and I need to stop living life at 100 miles per hour for a week or two at least.

    I’ll admit it now, I’ve been a terrible backpacker. I never planned to go backpacking around Asia or Australia. I wanted to live in places. When someone called me a backpacker while I was living in Chiang Mai I actually felt quite offended, a sentiment which continued throughout my whole time in Australia. Although my qualms with the Working Holiday Visa has nothing to do with why I’m choosing to not travel anymore. An important point here is the concept of choice – I’m choosing to fly back to Europe. I’m choosing not to go back to Asia, I’m choosing not to travel around Australia and “do the east coast.” These are all amazing things, but just not right for me at this time in my life, as I prefer stay calm and spend time with my loved ones and madelenewright virtual girlfriend online.

    Someone just asked me if i’m going to take a “pitstop” on the way home. I used to be all about pitstops. Ironically, this was when I had the least amount of money. After several months of consistently working and saving here in Melbourne, I now have more money in my bank account than I’ve ever had in my life, and the thought of spending any of it on a pitstop sounds preposterous. No, I have not lost the love or desire for travel, or for exploring new places and discovering new countries. It’s just not what I have saved all this money for. And because what I did save all this money for is not happening anymore (for another ridiculous, a-typical Aoibheann mistake), the plan B of continuing to travel instead suddenly feels like the wrong path to take.

    One thing that bothers me about backpacking and holidays is the inevitable end. The longer you spend hopping from one country to the other chasing those beach moments, the more you realise that you’re doing it to forget and avoid the mundane reality and normality of the life you’re going back to once you run out of money, or have ticked everything off your bucket list.

    Now, for some people this is absolutely fine and they don’t have any problem living like that. For me, however, it made me feel that the future was a very dark place. This sounds catastrophic (and if one more person tells me “you have your whole life ahead of you” one more time…), but the transiency of those moments, on a beautiful beaches in the sun, became very real to me very early on, and it is something I have struggled with enormously over the past year. I didn’t want to have to leave, ever. These places are where I was meant to stay, be, and live forever. But it’s not that simple.

    I wrote this about a month ago, just after I booked my flights home, as I was about to leave Australia. What was the “dismal and disappointing blow”? Well, that’s all part of the story. That I need to go back to.

    How did I get from Melbourne to New York? I’m now sitting in a café in Lower Manatten (Two Hands, an Australian café, ironically enough), sipping cold brew, over-caffeinated as usual, still with the same red backpack packed with red asics (now etched with the beginnings of a hole in the side) and my DSLR camera in my uncle’s old camera bag. I still experience crippling anxiety every time I take my camera out to photograph – I am so shy. I just want the world to stop, for time and people to freeze, so I can take my photos and continue on. But that doesn’t happen, and I still want my photos, so I make a hasty few clicks.

    I suddenly feel a lot farther away from where I left off the story in Chiang Mai, than when I did a few months ago starting this blog in Melbourne. It was all fresh and bright then. Now it feels static, it has all become something etched in the past, now just something my life contains. Another event, how I filled a certain time period. Whether that will make everything easier to tell, I’ll see. I’m not sure what platform I’m viewing it all from. Have a “learned so much since then?” Am I a “different person”? I don’t think so.

    Now I live in Bushwick (not Brunswick – and I take the subway, not the tram), and I work in Williamsburg. I’ve lived in New York before, as a student at Columbia. I’d rather not go back to that story. This is when I fell in love with New York, but my life situation at that time was less than desirable (thanks to a host of health problems). I haven’t been back to the campus yet – Upper West Side. I spend most of my time in Williamsburg now. Bushwick is very much just a necessary living location, unfortunately. I’m currently living off the Dekalb L tram stop, smack bang in the middle of the scene, grunge hipster catwalks of Brooklyn (which don’t quite rival Melbourne, but almost), but New York rent prices are astronomical, so I don’t really have a choice. Even Bushwick prices easily take up a large chunk of my paycheck. Luckily I’m a quick 20 minute subway to Union Square, back to the bustle and madness of Manhattan (which I love), and 15 minutes from work in Williamsburg.

    Williamsburg is my ‘hood. I gym there, I work there, I Whole Foods there. I absolutely love Williamsburg – it is so my thing. North Melbourne (Brunswick, Fitzroy etc.) was highly interesting and eclectic, but I definitely prefer the bougie, classy, French-Scandinavian aesthete and atmosphere of boroughs like Williamsburg, the East Village, Soho and Greenwich and such. I amn’t cool enough for the hippy and alternative bling of Bushwick and North Melbourne.

    There are so many things I want to do with this blog space now and in the future, but the most important move right now is to go back to where the story left off, when I got off the plane in Thailand 18 months ago, the move which would change every life plan I had up until then envisioned for myself. A sort of backward diary. But I also want to keep in tune with the present, so I’ll definitely be doing more current blog posts along the way.