11 Feb, 2024

My life is an uphill struggle right now.

Literally.

I have less than six months to go before I have (get / try) to run 170km around the mountains of Chamonix over the course of a week. That means six months before I subject myself to the most challenging week of exercise in my life. Hopefully also one of the most beautiful. And most cheese filled.

Breaking my knee has not been good for my fitness. The key to fitness is more movement. They key to fixing broken bones is less movement. Contradictory goals.

But things are on the up. The uphill kind of up that comes with climbing mountains.

I’m now back to being able to workout for a couple of hours, a few times per week. Not successive days yet, but my knee feels stronger, and more flexible each week. Until recently my main metric was pain. I’ve since introduced a secondary metric I call the squishy finger technique.

It measures how much I can crush my fingers between the back of my knee and the floor. I sit on a flat surface (a floor), legs straight out and slide my hands down under the kneecap. If I tense my quads, my right (healthy) knee will slightly hyperextend the joint, squashing my fingers, and lifting my heel off the floor. Until a few weeks ago, my left (broken) joint wouldn’t budge. The small gap between my fingers and the skin of the leg remained. My heel still stuck to the floor, quads totally unwilling to pull on the joint.

Squish level zero.

And now?

We’re getting somewhere!

Squish squash.

“Hello fingers” says the knee.

“Goodbye floor” says the heel.

I feel like I’m writing a children’s book here. All these body parts speaking to one another.

A long time ago, and for a long time, I did want to write a children’s book.

Well, a long time for me perhaps. Long-ish. My wants in life are often short lived.

Too many things to do. Too many things to learn.

Anyway, I wanted to write a children’s book.

Am I repeating myself? That’s an important part of writing a children’s book. Children aren’t too bright. You need to say the same thing, over and over. And over.