Sometimes It’s Hard for Me to Rest

Butterfly at the park, which I saw on my walk the other day. A walk, you’ll soon learn, that I should not have been taking. The butterfly was beautiful, though.

Funny how something that is supposed to help you can turn into a sort of tyrant. Like a simple daily goal of walking a certain number of steps

My knee started hurting last week, but I didn’t think much about it. I carried on with my daily goal of trying to log a certain number of steps on my phone’s step counter. The app that I use also lets me see how many steps I have taken so far this month. I try to beat last month’s count if possible, especially if it seemed like a month when I could have done more, if there was rain or snow or lots of traveling.

So I was aiming to beat the number of steps I had in March, and was vowing to get those steps in, and was doing pretty well, until my knee started hurting more. A lot more. To the point that it was painful to walk much at all. I asked AI, my handy pocket doctor, what you should do if your knee starts to hurt more while walking.

Apparently, if it hurts to walk, if the pain is increasing, you are not supposed to push yourself to walk more. AI gave me the tried and true advice that has been recommended by medical professionals, personal trainers and gym teachers for centuries: follow the RICE method, which means rest, ice, utilize some kind of compression, and elevate your sore limb whenever possible.

The rest part? That means that I should not keep soldiering on, limping toward my daily steps goal.  But giving up this daily goal? That was a hard one. Made me feel like a bit of a failure. I tried to think about it as making a new goal for myself: to clock as few steps as possible for the next week, until my knee started feeling better. This helped a little. I also started regular icing sessions again, which meant sitting on the couch with my knee elevated on the footstool.

Sitting on the couch with my knee elevated is sort of the opposite of heading out on a lovely springtime walk.

I also try to run a few times each week and enjoy keeping track of my runs on my handy Nike run app. This app is less helpful when you are injured. It sent me a gentle reminder that it had been more than a week since my last run, and didn’t I want to get out there today? It said, “Imagine how good you’ll feel after you complete a run today.”

“Yes!” Nike app. “Yes! Yes, I would. I would love to get out there. But I should not today. I need to rest.”

The rest seems to be helping. Also the ice, and the elevation, and the chiropractic adjustment that I received from the chiropractor that I work for. All helpful.

Also helpful? Breaking the tyranny of my self-imposed streaks, at least a little. Because I have a few of these! I have a Duolingo streak that is more than 1400 days long. A Wordle Streak that is 93 days long. I even have a streak on an app that I just downloaded after Christmas called Bend. It’s a good app which is helping me stretch a little everyday. Except sometimes I miss my morning stretch routine and am too tired in the evening to even think about it. But that app? That one you can cheat on. All I have to do is press “Start,” and the app thinks I’m stretching, but in reality I might just be sitting on the couch with ice on my knee.

That’s so silly when you think about it. It’s ridiculous. What does it matter if an app on my phone praises me or chides me for something I accomplish or fail to do? Why do I care? Why do I let any of this bother me? But I do. I was sad when I lost my Wordle streak when we traveled to Japan last summer; the time change did me in. I’m sad when my phone says that I haven’t walked much at all. Except what if rest is the best way to heal, even the only way to heal? That makes me think I need to take it more seriously. Something more to think about.