Running on empty

I‘m sure this post is going to come with a fair amount of “I told you so!!”s but here I go. I haven’t been able to run for about two months now. I kept putting it off, work was extremely hectic and my knees had started to bother me. At first I thought the knee pain was related to a new migraine-prevention medicine I had recently started taking, but as far as I can tell, it’s unrelated. I kept waiting for my knees to feel better, I took motrin, it didn’t help. After a few weeks I finally caved in and called the doctor.

So it would seem I have tendinitis in my knees. She gave me some kind of anti-inflamatory cream (?!), a print-out of hard to read, hard to understand (the point of) “exercises”, told me to put some heat on it and sent me on my way. The cream you’re supposed to put on 4x a day. Which is ridiculous. Who remembers to do something 4x a day?? And a cream?? How is a cream I put on my skin going to penetrate through the cartilage of my knee and make this better?? And the exercises? Aside from the fact that I can barely read the print-out, I really don’t see how they’re going to make my knees feel better. From what I can tell in the picture (which is easier to see than the writing) it has you do things like: Sit in a chair, kick your leg forward and then back. Repeat 3 sets of 75 reps. (I’m not exaggerating on the repetitions – and that’s just ONE of the exercises!! There’s 6 more on the page like it.). As far as heat goes… do you realize how difficult it is to keep a SQUARE flat heating pad on a bent knee? WHY don’t they make a heating pad specifically designed for your knee?? I know they have those Therma-care heating pads for knees, but I think they work out to be $4 each and I would need two of them for both of my knees, every day for who-knows-how long.

So the short story is that I’m thinking I’m going to be dealing with knee pain for awhile. We’re also suspicious that the running probably had something to do with this in the first place. So… yeah. No more running for me for a good long while. If ever. I’m happy that the pain is only when I bend it so I can keep doing my other exercise classes (like Hip Hop Hustle and was going to start Turbo Kick this week too). And the bonus is that since I can’t bend down so easily anymore, I’ve had to get Zach to learn how to put his shoes on by himself… which really isn’t such a bad thing!!

(Ironic how I was running to be healthy and instead it caused me to be injured. I think I’ve mentioned before my love-hate (well, more hate) relationship with exercise? This is a good example of why that is… Something that is good for you shouldn’t cause you PAIN! At least Hip Hop Hustle is still fun and hasn’t killed me yet! LOL!)

Hip Hop Hustle!

My 24 Hour Fitness just started a new class for Tuesday nights: Hip Hop Hustle. I take the Zumba class on Thursday nights and have been loving it – so another dance-style aerobics class was definitely something I had to try. It was totally awesome. In fact, I may even like it better than Zumba, which is really saying something. I wear a Polar F7 Heart Rate monitor (HRM) when I exercise, and even when I run, I struggle to get it to read a 300 calorie burn. When I’ve gotten it to read 400 – I know I’ve really pushed it. Well, in Hip Hop Hustle, I didn’t even feel like I was working that hard. There’s definitely room to work harder, but with my workload recently, I just wasn’t up to more than coasting through the class. Even still, my HRM had me burning over 400 calories. That was with me not even feeling that tired after the class!! When I’m up to working harder, I wonder how high that calorie burn is going to be!

If you have access to a Hip Hop Hustle class, and you like dance-style aerobics, definitely check it out. I know that how much fun a class is can really be dependent on the instructor. So if you don’t like one class, try another one with a different instructor to see if you might like the class better. (That goes for Zumba classes too – which I still plan on going to on)