What my knee told me today!

My knees have been bothering me for, oh, well, as long as I can remember really, but not THAT much, my ankle has been a lot worse, but since I left Oslo and stopped walking for 2 hours on hard pavements every day that’s become a lot better. Since I left Oslo I have also started using aerobic/dancing (only at home to myself, nothing fancy) as one of my forms of training, I try to do this 5 days a week, and end up doing it 3 to 4 days a week.

Anyway, since I started this routine my knees have grumbled, they’ve been telling me that they’re not very happy about this new development – and all the time they’ve been complaining I’ve been telling them “look, I hear what you’re saying, but there really isn’t much I can do with it – really. You’re my knees and I want to do this training so suck it up and deal with it!” They’ve kept on complaining, not in a very loud painful way, but just sort of mumbling in the back of my ear “we don’t like this”.

I guess I somehow knew that at some point they would act on the fact that I don’t seem to listen to them. Five minutes into my aerobic/dance session today, my right knee suddenly made a strange noise and then it told me IN REALLY LARGE LETTERS – HEY THIS HURTS LIKE HELL NOW! I went on for another 3 – 4 minutes, trying to ignore it as I always have, I mean, most problems go away if you only ignore them long enough, right???? But it is really hard ignoring someone who is actually screaming from pain. So, I stopped – to put on one of those support bands (that I had kept since I played handball 16 years ago – come to think of it, during my years as a handball player that’s when my knees first started complaining! Should have thought they would’ve gotten over it by now….) to keep around the knee, then I went on with my training – trying to ignore the fact that even though my knee wasn’t actually shouting at me any more it was still sort of whimpering and crying every time I put weight on it – my God the things someone will do to get attention!

After about 25 minutes of not very effective training I must say, I obviously misjudged once more just how mad my right knee was at me because suddenly it just gave in – it just wouldn’t let me put any weight on it all! “Right!” I thought “you’re not going to get away with this just like that, if I’ve said we’re going to exercise for an hour, that’s what we’re going to do!” – so I turned to my exercise bike and had one hell of a time getting on it because my knee still wouldn’t be supportive of this action, but got on it finally.

20 minutes later my knee informed me that it was completely fed up with me not listening to it so now it was going to go on strike – and it did! That’s when I finally realized that this fight I was having with my knee, was one I was probably not going to win, not today anyway – and limped to the shower asking my knee “happy now???” – My knee just kept mumbling its complaints without really responding to my question.

And it really sticks with this complaining you know, not loudly, oh no, but when I sit in the chair and watch TV or by the computer – it just keeps reminding me, all the time, in this low irritating way that it really doesn’t feel well at all – and every time I get up to do something it screams very loud, and very short, and goes back to mumbling again.

Me? I’m still hoping that I’ll wake up tomorrow and discover that my knee has forgotten all about it – because the weather forecast for tomorrow says sunny and I’m actually planning another skiing trip – I just haven’t dared to inform my knee yet that that’s on the schedule for tomorrow. Maybe I’ll manage to surprise it so much with my boldness that it will forget to complain???