Location Taken: Savage, Maryland
Time Taken: August 2012
Today, for the first time in my life, I felt the need to exercise. I even woke up with it.
So I got up, fed the dogs, started an artichoke roasting for breakfast, then got out my bike.
I only went up and down the street, but there’s enough of a slope to make it a challenge on the way up (and a really fun, if fast, ride down). I can usually do two laps before my knees start complaining too much, but today I managed three! It takes me about 5 minutes per lap, so that was 15 minutes of fairly intense exercise.
I’ve long had a problem with exercising. It wasn’t always the case. I was an active kid, spending long hours in the woods making forts, or going biking. Or even making a makeshift quarterstaff and waving it around the yard pretending to fight monsters.
It was doing that last thing that I first dislocated my knee.
I inherited weak knees from both sides of the family. At least I also inherited the tendency for them to promptly relocate after the tension that caused the kneecap to pop out eased, but it still causes a lot of damage in a brief moment.
I’ve dislocated both my knees at least 5 times each. It doesn’t take much, as even a simple pivoting motion, such as turning a corner, can do it. I tend to walk a bit carefully to avoid it, since being unable to walk for 10 or more minutes and having noticeable pain for days afterwards can put a bit of a kink in any plans I had.
I also had Childhood Exercise-Induced Asthma, which would mean when I exercised enough to start breathing heavily, I wouldn’t be able to stop, and the more I exercised, the worse my breathing got. It didn’t fade until I was 22 or so.
Between those, genetics that favor plumpness, and stress from going to public school while being both social phobic and weird enough to be in the “outcast” social level, it’s no wonder I’m fat. At least that genetic tendency towards plumpness also includes an ability to be both fat and healthy, so it’s not had much impact on my lifestyle. Especially since just about all of my preferred activities are those that require you to be sitting.
Which, admittedly, did not help my knees any. Sitting weakens knees, and the weight doesn’t help them much either. At my worst, walking up stairs would cause sharp jolts of pain to echo from my knees with every step. Which really didn’t encourage me to exercise either, since it hurt too much.
After college, though, I entered a period of my life where I’m rebuilding and re-imagining myself. (I should talk more about the social phobia based nervous breakdown that lead to that. Perhaps next week.) While the emotional stuff had highest priority, and has taken years to go through (and I’m still not done), I did eventually realize that while I was changing the habits that lead to the breakdown in the first place, I could change other habits.
I started by eating healthier. I’ve never ate particularly unhealthily, since I actually really like vegetables, but I started cooking from scratch and figuring out more ways to cook delicious filling meals that didn’t rely on filler like pasta or rice. That’s why I ended up eating a roasted artichoke for breakfast this morning. And it was very tasty, too, better than many restaurant meals I’ve had.
I also managed to get my knees to cooperate better, thanks to the long hours of standing at my job at the Renn Fest. It strengthened them up, and I haven’t fully dislocated them for years thanks to that. I still don’t have the full range of motion other people have, but at least I don’t have any pain anymore.
And I also started hunting for exercise that I could keep up with. Just about every form of exercise is either too boring for me to actually make into a habit (repetition just doesn’t cut it for me), too social for me (team sports), or too rough on the knees. For instance, the very first time I tried the standard Karate kick in my one session I tried, I dislocated my knee. Plus many exercises are a bit outside my budget, which is why I’ve never tried rock climbing, despite being interested in it.
That last factor is why it took me so long to start biking. I’d really enjoyed biking as a kid, but stopped after I took a bad fall and cracked my helmet. It wasn’t from any fear, just that I certainly wasn’t going biking without a helmet after that, and well, school started up less than a week after that, and I got too busy to bike anyway. Plus, the position most adult bikes put you in, hunched over the handlebars, is both painful on my back and doesn’t let me watch the world around me that easily.
Which is why I couldn’t just buy a $30 beater off of Craigslist or something. I needed a different sort of bike. And I found one. The Electra Townie has shifted positions for its pedals and seat that let the rider sit upright and even have her feet on the ground while sitting in the seat. I might have to put the seat almost all the way down to fit my 5’3″ frame, but at least I CAN still use it at my height, which is more than I can say about far too many bikes. It took a while (and help from my parents)(and a serious sale) to afford the $400 price, but at the end of last May, I finally got it.
I’m not biking every day yet, though I hope to get to that someday, and my endurance still has a long way to go. I have trouble with hills for the very simple reason that it takes a lot of energy to haul my nearly 300 lbs weight uphill. Actually, that weight may have gone down. I haven’t weighed myself since before I got the bike, after all. It’s actually not a high priority. I’m much more interested in gaining strength than losing weight. And I’m not willing to go biking when the temperature’s above 90, which it has been for far too much of the past few months. It’s too unpleasant to deal with that heat even with how much I like biking
And I love biking. It’s the first form of exercise I’ve found that actually lets me get that post-exercise euphoria that the fitness buffs talk about. Plus it lets me go exploring a lot easier than walking can. I can watch the world go by easily with the upright position the Townie lets me sit in, so I stay entertained. And I love feeling the wind and speed when I go downhill. I’ve finally found an exercise I actually want to do, and it’s a glorious thing.
