Be Kind to Your Knees

Yesterday morning marked my third class of bootcamp to get my lazy butt back in shape after a year of nursing broken bones and sprained ankles, because who didn’t have a new year’s resolution that included getting in shape?! 

I’m hiking again and exercising again and it feels great to be out and about again.  And my knee is handling it like a champ . . . the rest of my out-of-shape body is not enjoying the process, but my knee has been great.  That is until yesterday’s bootcamp.  There were two differences between the previous two bootcamps and yesterday’s foray to a better me.  Those differences were the time of day . . . and about 30 degrees.

It was just shy of freezing when I braved the elements with the intention of creating a smaller version of myself . . . it became clear within the first few steps of the warm up lap to the big tree and back that my knee no longer appreciated the cold weather as much as I do. I survived it, no worse for wear (Well, maybe a little – but no worse than the previous classes), but every lunge and squat after the warm-up lap was met with my knee asking the question, ‘is this really such a good idea?’

That is a shame.  The cold morning long runs, before most people were awake, were one of the best parts of the training I did for a few races a few years back.  I’m not going to pretend that the first part of the run didn’t suck.  Bundling up in a ridiculous amount of layers and psyching yourself up to leave your nice warm house wasn’t always the easiest thing to do.  But once you got your first couple miles done, shed a layer or two and warmed up, nothing beat the feeling of freezing air entering your overheated lungs.  Fresh . . . crisp . . . beautiful!

I miss this guy!

 

Now it looks like that feeling may be a thing of the past.

Shortly after I graduated high school a song became pretty popular. It took the speech a person gave at a graduation and put it to music.  While the main issue this person wanted to get across to his audience was another subject, one of the lines was, ‘be kind to your knees, you’ll miss them when they are gone.’

When that song came along, I liked to believe that I really heard what the person was saying; that I was wise beyond my years and somehow had it all figured out a little more than most of my peers.  Perhaps we all felt that way. All I know, is the older I get, the more I realize that this person’s words, for the most part, just bounced off of my head like most of the advice I was given when I was younger . . . I could have been a lot kinder to my knees.

I guess that no matter how much you try to learn from the mistakes of others, most of the lessons you learn won’t fully be understood until you make the mistake yourself.  All I know is I really do miss my knee and the possibility that I may never experience a 7-mile run in the freezing cold to watch the sun slowly poke over the horizon kind of makes me sad.

Be kind to your knees everyone!

Until next we meet.