My wedding night, I was six months pregnant. I still danced until my feet gave out. I remember after a night of celebrating, both ankles were so swollen that they had disappeared into my calves, a phenomenon charmingly referred to as “cankles”. Today, I didn’t even get the fun of dancing but still, after walking a mile and sitting at a desk, here we are with one cankle:
I still went to the gym tonight, but only to swim. Being in the water meant activity without weight on my ankle. I kept it to 20 minutes on the pool, 200 yards of laps, just enough for me to feel like I did something and to see if that negatively impacts my recovery at all. The ankle hurts, especially since I went off my painkiller/NSAID medication this week, but it’s a pain I can live with.
Also, it was nice to get the swim time in. I have to do some sort of cardio to keep my endorphins up. In my toolkit of Ways I Manage my Brain, cardio is one of the tools I don’t reach for enough. Then on nights like tonight when I do use it, I remember it’s extremely helpful and I should pick it up all the time. It would be smart of me to do more cycling and swimming while recovering enough to run. I just need to get back in a daily habit of prioritizing that time.
Also, I got to see how my new Fitbit tracks swimming! The answer is: in stalker like detail
Like most people, I have a bad habit of dithering time away on the unimportant, which means work takes longer, which means I don’t get to the gym until after 7pm and then end up heading back to the office to take a Scout planning call instead of getting on the subway, which means in turn I don’t get home until 11pm on a Wednesday, which means I can’t get up early enough to work out because I have an 8am appointment to get my bangs trimmed in SoHo. This has nothing to do with my sprained ankle of course, and everything to do with bad habits, the kind of habits that allow me to put off self-care and fitness time under the guise of work, which in turn has been dragged out by a lack focus. Which is why I’m on a subway at 10:30pm on a Wednesday.
In the interim, I have bloody cankles, and my entire right leg is twinging with the effort of balancing on one leg this evening as part of my requisite physio recovery process. But at least I went swimming. I got the start of a better habit in place. I prioritized that activity even if it wasn’t well planned. The cankle will eventually go away, but maybe, just maybe, I can use this time of recovery as impetus to be more mindful and deliberate in my physical activity.
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