one clumsy girl

Our house in DC metro finally sold, we bought a place out here, and everything in storage was delivered — finally!

When the mover was unloading my bag of gear, N asked him, “hey, how bad does that smell?”

Mover, “uh. Maybe a little…”

Heh.

I started doing Couch to 5k again and (of course! see clumsy) messed up my achilles tendon. It feels better today, so tomorrow should be a go for a run with the (5.5 year old) puppy.

As for getting on the ice, I’m hoping to talk N into going to a public skate with me this weekend (depending on when his next game is). Here’s hoping!

When I moved to Seattle in late 2001, my dad emailed me a link to the Seattle Women’s Hockey Club. At the time I didn’t have the budget to invest in all of the equipment, but I kept it in the back of my mind.

I moved back to the DC area in 2003. In 2006 I started taking skating lessons and in 2007 I started going to stick and shoots & taking hockey classes. My knee injury in early 2008 has kept me from the ice for the past 10 months (ugh), but I think I may be getting to the point where I just go out there and see what happens.

My hockey equipment has been packed away and shoved into the attic as we prepare our house in DC for selling and get everything ready to return to Seattle. I pulled my skates out of the bag along with a pair of skate socks in the hopes that I find the time to get out on the ice here before we move or after we get to temporary housing in Seattle. And maybe then I will be able to join the SWHC.

I upgraded wordpress last night to the current version including upgrading the database schema. Please let me know if there is anything awry.

From a content standpoint, I’m trying to decide if I want to start [b]logging things other than skating since I’m still not able to skate due to my knee (but I think I am close). I’m staying active with cycling and weights and some minor jogging.

Less than 24 hours after I wrote the PT update the other day, my sharp knee pain was back with a vengeance. Was it the weather? Did I do any different activity on those days? Was it because I missed my at-home exercises twice last week? No idea.

Today it felt better again until after PT, when it started to hurt again. I iced it and I took my prescription anti-inflammatory, but it’s still bugging me. Hopefully tomorrow it will be better.

I’m not sure — and the sports medicine office takes a VERY conservative approach to recommendations along this line: they say for this injury, if it hurts, don’t do it! — how much I should push myself in terms of pain and how much I shouldn’t. I am known for working through injuries and re-injuring myself. I am known for ignoring symptoms and pain. I am trying very hard to take care of myself here and not end up with a recurring, nagging injury that doesn’t ever heal.

It’s very frustrating. It still hurts to walk the dogs. I definitely can’t run or skate yet without sharp pain.

I really need to instead focus on the stuff I can do: ride the recumbent bike, do my mat exercises, do all of the weight machine exercises. I like doing this stuff just fine, but it’s not running or walking the dogs or hiking or pretending to play hockey.

This week is my fourth week of physical therapy for my PFS and ITBS.

The first week I did not feel any worse or better. The second week I felt worse (my orthopaedist warned me that would probably happen). At the end of last week, my third week, my knee finally started to feel a little better.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not right yet. I still can’t put full weight on my right leg without severe pain. But I can cycle on the recumbent with little to no discomfort, I am able to do most of the weight machine work we do at PT without pain (the on-my-stomach leg curls do hurt when my leg is straight and weight is on the back of the leg).

I have another three weeks of PT and this week I plan to start cycling on my own at the gym.

I may also be a little distracted by N’s hockey season starting up on Thursday and this:

caps playoff tickets– HECK YEA!

Let’s Go Caps!

Just a quick FYI: the site will be down for a period of time this weekend while my WSP moves a bunch of servers to their new datacenter.

They suggest a 12 hour window from midnight eastern (GMT -4) through noon on Saturday, 22 March 2008. Working in the industry, I think this is a small window, so I anticipate the downtime being closer to 24 hours (but maybe they will surprise me!).

Sorry for the inconvenience!

PT is going. Today they teased me and said that they were going to put the “pain and torture” into PT. Ha!

However, I was put on the bike today and it made my day! My leg is really feeling everything else we did today, mostly along the IT band.

At the beginning of February, when I was planning to jump back into hockey practice, my knee started to hurt. It wasn’t just a wee bit of pain, it was weak, it would collapse when I put weight on it, and it had been clicking and locking.

After a month of limiting my activity and avoiding the doctor (“I can walk, even though it hurts, it must not be that bad”), it wasn’t getting better and seemed to be getting worse, so I finally made an appointment at the orthopaedist.

They took x-rays and sent me for an mri (both new experiences for me).

sagittal view of my right knee

The injury? Two things. Patellofemoral pain syndrome (aka runner’s knee or chondromalacia patella) and IT (iliotibial) band inflammation. The cause appears to be my severe overpronation on the right. Just over a year ago my right arch fell and despite wearing OTC orthotics and shoes with motion control, apparently it affected my gait enough to misalign my patella and femur and cause my IT band inflammation.

We were concerned that it was a meniscus tear due to the level of pain I have, so it is a good sign that there was no obvious large tear on the mri films.

I start PT on Tuesday and will go twice a week for 6 weeks in addition to doing exercises at home daily. The PT is supposed to help strengthen and stretch my thighs which should help realign everything. Doc indicated that the PT will probably cause me more pain for the first two weeks but that after that, it should start to feel better. If not, we’ll have to discuss arthroscopic surgery.

Doc also indicated that it will probably take at least three months before I am able to run or skate (ugh!), but that I can ride the bike at a low resistance and swim now (anything with low impact on the knee). Of course, today I am in too much pain to do that, but maybe soon.

A handful of firsts from class this week:

• first goal that made it through a real, actual goalie (in a drill, so it doesn’t really count). It went in 5-hole off of his skate.
  
• first scrimmage (wow, I was HORRIBLE)
  
• first face-off. I went out for the first shift on the ice and everyone had lined up at every position except center. I guess no one else wanted to take the faceoff. So I took it. Why not? (I lost!)

Class this week was fun — we chased frisbees (I need to work on explosive starts!), power turns (I need to work on cupping the puck going to the left), Montreal drill (I need to work on stick handling), and scrimmaged for 20 minutes.

What did I do well? My power turns aren’t too awful, though I think I could get deeper on my outer edge. My passing was accurate — the worst pass I had was hitting someone at the skates instead of at the tape, every other pass was tape-to-tape. I can catch passes alright, though controlling the puck afterwards was a bit of a problem (and sorta defeats the purpose of catching the pass to begin with).

During the scrimmage I was completely awful and I ended up with a horrible chest cramp after my first or second shift that made it impossible to breathe. I skipped one shift, did some yoga breathing and managed to get it to a less painful place and took the rest of my shifts despite the pain.

I played center, wing, and defense during the scrimmage since we were all pretty much just rotating in when needed (5 on 5, only 8 skaters per side, so lots of shifts and they were long). I got confused at one point when I was playing D on the left side and my partner was just like … all over the place. So I hung back and kept a body on the other team and let my partner wander.

I was really, really slow. I sprinted as best as I could, but some of our shifts were long (2+ minutes) and there’s no recovery when you have no sprint legs left.

Hub watched part of the scrimmage and said that I looked like I was using my stick as a third leg, which may have been true given how exhausted I was. I did intentionally keep my stick down because that’s something I’ve been working on — in street and roller hockey, I tend to hold my stick up when I’m moving without the ball.

So, as usual, I was horrible, but it was fun! I do think I am getting better. Hopefully that’s not just wishful thinking!

[note: I missed class last week due to a work emergency. And I really need my skates sharpened. Maybe tomorrow after stick 'n shoot. ]

Wednesday’s class ended with everyone taking turns going one-on-one against the goalie. If we didn’t beat him, we had to do push ups.

My first shot was weak, went off the goalie’s left leg. Pushups for me! I couldn’t get the tip of my skate into the ice well enough to stay still enough to do a pushup without my feet sliding all over the place.

My second shot was also weak, but I lifted it, just north of the crest. With a bit more force and an earlier release, I may have scored.

Not completely awful for my first two shots on a real official ice hockey goalie, though!

Other things learned:

• I like to compensate for a lame outer edge by going extra deep on my inner. It doesn’t really work (and in fact I think slows me down), but it feels cool.
  
• my backwards skating sucks. Horribly. My left foot will not move AT ALL if my legs are tired, it just drags along.
  
• my left skate does not like to sit on the flat of the blade. We did a drill where we take one push and hold the leg up in the air and balance as far as we can. Benny said that pros should all be able to take one push and go goal line to goal line. I don’t even think I made it goal line to top of the crease!
  
• I think my problem with my wrist shot was where the puck is relative to my feet. I did find that I started transferring my weight more, so much that I would end up with my back (right) leg up in the air and all of my weight on my front (left) leg. That’s probably a positive thing. I also find that my wrist shot is easier to take if I am already moving, not just standing along the boards.

I had a horrible class this week — not that I didn’t have fun (because I did), I just felt like I couldn’t do anything we drilled on. I was the worst person in the class during the backwards skating drills — super slow and simply not able to physically do some of the things we were drilling on. I was extremely frustrated by the time class was over.

Also, the velcro on one of my jocks isn’t clinging anymore, so one of my stockings kept falling down during class (despite tape and velcro straps). I think I’ll be adding some extra velcro to it.

Any hints for how to keep my elbow pads from falling down? The fact is that elbow pads are always going to be wider above the elbow than below, so of course they want to fall down. I think hubs has better designed elbow pads, but he said that his keep falling down, too.

I added some tape to the velcro on the center of the elbow pad (mostly to keep my jersey from catching) and that helped a few weeks ago, but this week they kept falling down. Annoying!

I’m not sure what we’ll be doing in class on Wednesday, but I’m off to the rink Monday or Tuesday afternoon for stick ‘n shoot.

I’ve had two weeks off of hockey class due to the July 4th holiday last week and Caps development camp this week.

I took some time today after work to watch the prospect kids scrimmage.

hey! that’s the sheet I skate on!

They were fast, incredibly fast. I’m not sure if I thought they were so fast because I’ve been watching novice league games on that sheet all summer, or if it is because I skate on that very same sheet at class (and I am very far from fast), but yow!

It was fun to watch them scrimmage, and there were quite a few people there.

As for this true rookie, I’m hoping to find the time (and to get enough sleep) to make it to stick ‘n shoot tomorrow evening. I skated at stick ‘n shoot on Monday and had an abysmal time. I was sore all over and had zero energy. Hopefully I can fit in a better practice tomorrow.

My next class is next Wednesday evening. I’d like to get in a couple of stick ‘n shoots and maybe a public skate before Wednesday. We’ll see how it shakes out.