Almost anything is a cycle. The whole working out thing is also cyclic. You know, you are going along, doing really well, making it happen, then something happens, you lose focus, gain weight, get lazy, then you decide to do something about it and the cycle starts all over again. It is unfortunate that being human gets in the way and this is how it happens. I think the ones that this doesn't happen to are the lucky ones. I'm not so lucky. At all.
You may be surprised to know that I was a cheerleader in high school. Yup. I was. As I mentioned before, my family was not a physically motivated one by nature. I was still pretty stinking chubby as a freshman in high school, but I worked so very hard to make the sophomore cheer squad. My jean hiking dad was not happy that I would be prancing (literally a way to move as a cheerleader, by the way) in a short skirt. I look at pictures of the first time I wore that uniform and it really isn't too pretty. Chubby legs, but getting there.
Anyhoo, I continued cheerleading for my sophomore, junior and part of my senior year. I loved it. Cheerleading was my passion. It was really what I lived to do. I really loved it. I actually felt it was something that I was decent at doing for the time that I did it.
It was in the early fall, my sister was having her cheerleading pictures taken at a local park, I had my jean hiking dad's car for the week while he was on vacation, it was after school and PIC #2 and I were going to spend the afternoon until we had to pick my sister up at another local park and hangout for our friends. We stopped at home and I briefly thought about taking the family dog with us, but decided against it. PIC #2 and I were on our way, stopped waiting to turn into the park and we were hit from behind by a woman going extremely fast. The impact pushed us into oncoming traffic and we hit the side of an oncoming vehicle with the front of our car. Gasoline was pouring out everywhere, we get out, dazed and slightly confused. We were met shortly thereafter by some of our friends who had heard the accident.
None of my friends wanted me to look at the car, which everyone knew that my dad had purchased brand new in the 1970's. The car was accordioned up the front and the back. The back seat was touching the back of the front seats. The only part that wasn't smashed was the compartment that PIC #2 and I were sitting in. Neither one of us was seriously injured. She and I felt it the next morning and had whiplash, but that's all we knew at the time. We later found out that the woman driving the car was on her way to take her mother to dialysis when her mother started "gurgling." She started to tend to her mother, foot on the accelerator and accelerated straight into us, turning at the very last millisecond to try and avoid the crash.
I started cheerleading and had a bit of pain in my left knee. I worked through it, icing it, kept going to practice and just pushed on. One of the first games we cheered, my knee swelled up to the size of a softball. It was hot to the touch and just plain weird. I had to sit out a bulk of that game in the stands and tried to ice it. It was difficult to walk and felt like there was bone grinding against bone when I would walk.
Went to the doctor and had an MRI. The doctor found that the cartilage behind my kneecap was rigid, jagged and indeed grinding against the bone. Upon closer examination, it seemed that the months of working through the pain and soreness did me no good. My leg had retrained itself to adjust and alleviate the pain by using different muscles. A "normal" motion of you kneecap when you bend and straighten your leg is an "s" and mine was an "L." Great. The doctor's solution: arthroscopic surgery to remove and smooth the kneecap and to snip the muscle that was pulling my kneecap in the "L" direction to strengthen and retrain my muscles. Yay. Not really. During the accident, the placement of my left leg (which I do NOT do to this day) was outstretched and almost straight, which was how I used to drive. Upon the impact, the doctor concluded that I basically jammed the knee. Great.
The surgery was awful. It was painful and the recovery was terrible. I have problems every now and again with storms and if my shoes aren't cushiony enough on hard surfaces for prolonged amounts of time. Anyhoo, I had to drop cheerleading and it was devastating to me. I hated having to do that. Fortunate for me, during this time, my metabolism still actually worked and I didn't have to worry too much about keeping the weight off. I wasn't able to resume full activity for quite a while, but by then, cheerleading was over and I had graduated and started college. Working out didn't have the same meaning as it did when I had cheerleading goals and reasons to be working out, other than the sheer pleasure to workout. I struggled with that for a long time.
Point of this story? It IS important to have goals. They can be YOUR goals and they can be trivial (me wanting to be able to get out of my car and flip my hair with confidence). They can be important. They can be meaningful. Or they can be that "something" you need to keep pushing on. Whatever your reason may be, make it your own. Find your niche. Find what it was that you thought you had lost.
Signing off for now, to all of you near and far and to those of you that are in disbelief that I was ever a cheerleader, until next time...
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