Moons Over My Hammy - Surgery Tips!

As an aside, I forgot how much I used to enjoy coming up with fun names for my entries. I've begun to think about them with renewed vigor, so I hope you like this one. Now, gather round, children. Let me tell you some of what I learned about hamstring surgery.

I also want to acknowledge in advance that I've mixed first person ("I did") and second person ("you should") in this post. In the immortal words of Whitney Houston, it's not right, but it's okay.

Prep
In the week beforehand, I tried to do as much internet research as possible. According to the hospital rep, the surgery and ensuing recovery would be long, but not especially difficult. According to the internet, it would be the worst experience of my life. I decided the real story was somewhere in the middle. This guy's blog was extremely helpful. Some things I did to prepare include:

• Canceled travel plans. I had a work trip and high school reunion scheduled less than a week after surgery.
• Canceled my monthly gym membership. I'd started running at a running gym and got into a good rhythm but obviously didn't want to keep paying for a membership I won't use for a couple months.
• Got pre-surgery authorization and tests done. This included a check-up and bloodwork.
• Made arrangements with my dogwalker. My building has 3 flights of stairs, so I had her walk Phoebe for all three walks through the middle of the week, at which point I was able to make it downstairs and take her out for quick bathroom breaks (not long walks, though). 
• Deep-cleaned my apartment. I wanted to have a clean and orderly place since I was going to be stuck. This included doing a lot of laundry.
• Bought a lot of groceries. I was concerned about eating too much and not exercising at all, so I tried to keep it as healthy as possible. I got a lot of spinach and carrots, some frozen dishes, and enough bread, peanut butter, and jelly to make a whole stack of PB&J for easy consumption.
• Made a spare set of keys. This was one of my better ideas, and allowed me to leave keys downstairs for my guests, since my building doesn't have a buzzer and I otherwise would've had to go up and down all the stairs to let them in.
  

Surgery
This is the boring part, since I wasn't awake for any of it. I found what seems to be a surgical procedure paper for what I had. If I'm being honest, I didn't understand most of it but what I did understand was pretty cool. As far as timelines go, my surgery happened around 12pm, finished a little after 2pm, and I got home between 7 and 8pm.

Recovery

Attire:
I went into this thinking I would be living in sweats the whole time, because that's the only thing that fit over this brace. Quickly, though, I realized that was going to be extremely cumbersome and so my uniform became running shorts and t-shirts. In hindsight, I wish I'd thought about what I wanted to be wearing so I could dig up my favorite running shorts and shirts for easy access.

I figured out a lot of things, but how to put a sock on my brace foot was not one of them.

Helpful Items:

• Slip-on shoes - convenient for when you can bend almost not at all
• Grabber - same. Helpful for light switches, dropped phones, trash, etc.
• Extra pillows - I devised a pillow system. There are work pillows, sleeping pillows, and leg pillows. I urge you to think about your pillow system.
• Power outlet - It's 2019 and everything needs to be charged. Get a power strip that's within reach of your arms or your grabber.
• Food - Trader Joe's is your friend.
• Baby wipes - You'll thank me later.
• Shower chair - I think everyone probably has their own shower system. Mine required use of a chair I wouldn't have otherwise expected to purchase for another 45-50 years.
• Paper towels - Optional except if you have a neurotic pet.

These are my early impressions, but I intend to be back with more.

Bonus pic of Phoebe keeping me company

Surgery summary

The surgery was initially scheduled for 12:45 and they told me to be there 2 hours early. If you've read this blog and/or if you know me at all, you will not be surprised to learn that I arrived pretty late, for which I have no excuse. I wore very comfortable clothes and brought my slip-on shoes (see below sections).

A scheduling thing happened so that everything was expedited, and as soon as I got to the hospital there was a flurry of paperwork and meeting people like the surgeon and anesthesiologist. I was attended to by a Russian nurse named Stella who had a spectacular pre-surgery comedy routine and a large male nurse named Vlad, who was "the flipper" since the anesthesia took effect while I was facing up but the surgery had to be face down.

Lessons Learned

I spent 2012 running 2012 miles and training for an Ironman, which left me in the best shape of my life. Sometime in the spring of that year I remember doing my favorite speed workout (half mile intervals) on a treadmill at New York Health & Racquet Club. The usual structure of this workout was a half mile warmup at 10 minutes/mile which led directly into a half-mile sprint at a 7-730 min/mile pace and then alternated with quarter miles at 10 minutes/mile. I tried to repeat this 5-7 times.

Looking back, I now acknowledge that this was a pretty intense workout. It should have come as no surprise, then, when on this particular evening I felt a pop in my hamstring and immediate pain after. I stopped the treadmill for a bit and tried walking, and then stopping it to figure out what might have happened. I even had my friend Jared, who was a personal trainer there at the time, stretch me out (in retrospect, ouch and why).

Taking care of things like this properly is something I've only started learning in the last year or so. If it had happened today, I would have immediately made a doctor's appointment and gotten it checked out. Alas, my solution in 2013 was to KEEP ON RUNNING, BUT SLOWER. This is dumb and I urge you all to take better care of your injuries.

Fast forward to the beginning of 2019. Between 2013 and 2019, my hamstring has continued to hurt at various levels of intensity but the general trend has been that it's increasingly difficult to run at any speed that feels remotely fast. Since January, I'd actually done a great job of getting better about running regularly and devising systems and strategies that made it easier. I signed up to play rec basketball on Saturday mornings, began Citibiking to Mile High Run Club on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings, and resuming somewhat regular weekend long runs.

But my old hamstring was having none of it, and flared up in a serious way after the 10k track relay in February. During a basketball game about a month ago, I fell and again felt a popping sensation, and felt immediately like it might be something serious.

A few doctor's appointments and some tests later, I learned I had a complete 3-tendon tear of my hamstring and I was going to need surgery! So that's what I've been up to the last two weeks. I plan to follow up with more thoughts, tips, and tricks that I've learned about hamstring surgery but we'll see!

This sounded...not good

Well Sometimes I Go Out By Myself

Okay, so the thing is I've had Valerie by Amy Winehouse stuck in my head for like a week and I don't think it's coming out until I get to sing it at karaoke. And thus we have this somewhat nonsensical title. This evening I was running along the east side of Manhattan as I often do and this was stuck in my head, as I have mentioned and so I listened to it on repeat for all 5.56 miles and I even Snapchatted (snapped? I don't know what the kids are calling it these days) a picture of the river and two bridges with this as the caption. I will probably read all this in 3 years and be full of regret.

I decided on some goals and I added them to my spreadsheet and that tab. One of them is just to go to the Monday night speed workout I've been attending all year. That's all the Mondays in 2018. I'm sure it'll be challenging but my plan is just to take it one week at a time. The other goal is to run the Brooklyn Half in under 2 hours.

9 years ago, the idea of running a half in under 2 hours seemed damn near impossible because I couldn't conceive of running that fast for that long. Then some stuff happened and I got better and faster and 5 years ago, the idea of running a half over 2 hours seemed like something barely worth mentioning because I could do it so easily and regularly.

And now I'm back somewhere in between which sucks a little bit, although I've accepted it. Until next time!

Happy 2018!

I am resolving to post here more regularly this year and if my training thus far has been any indication, I just may follow through.

I realized just now before starting this post that I never updated my goals for 2017! I'm going to have to mull that over. One that I can tell you about is that I would like to run 1,500 miles this year. I've had years of running more (2012, 2013) and certainly years of running less (all the other years) and I think all things considered, this goal is ambitious without being overwhelming.

At the end of last year and to some extent, this year, I've made do with runs home from work to get in some mileage. That's all well and good, and if you've been around these parts awhile you'll know that no one appreciates a good run commute more than I do; HOWEVER, I keep telling myself that one of these days I'll avail myself of more sophisticated training resources and/or plans or even just bother following some sort of schedule. Perhaps this is the year.

So far, I've gotten into something of a rhythm. Saturday/Sunday is long run day, Monday is speedwork day, Tuesday is hills. That's more workout regularity than I've followed in a long time. I don't want to tout it too much because the year is still very young. Let's see where I am with this in June before I claim it as habit.

PS - I am behind schedule technically, but not by a lot and only because I had a bad first week. Onward!

Joy!

I had such a run tonight. It was the kind that was hard and easy at the same time. Hard because the route and pace were a little challenging but easy because I found so much wonder and fun in it. During my best running days, runs like this were rare and continue to be and maybe that's a good thing. If I derived no joy from the rest of my runs (and I do derive a more slow and measured amount of joy or general enjoyment from them), these once every few years runs would be enough, I think.

There's something about a clear, fall night and friends and running fast (or at least faster than I typically run) which is perhaps a  recipe for elation and I had all these things. It was a perfectly crisp fall night and I met up with my friends Elana and Emily at the Queensboro Bridge for an 8 mile run. Even leaving my apartment and walking into the night was lovely. Maybe because I had an unexpected night off, I was less burdened by my usual anxieties and more able to be excited

Hello Hi

Just blowing the dust off over here. I am happy to report that I'm a lot less lost than I was in March! Hooray. I haven't even gone back to read that post because I sort of don't want to. Upon further reflection, I'm not gonna. Not right now.

I've been busy since then. I'm seven races into 9+1 for 2018, which will be (if all goes well) my tenth New York City Marathon. I've been biking a whole bunch, and I also completed my third Ironman. Look, here's a picture of my medal and bib.

It was a whole thing. Normally, I would attempt to put up a race report and inevitably I would be too ambitious and try to break it up into like five different parts and only get through three or four but I'm getting back into all of this very slowly, which maybe has been my saving grace.

I've also been trying to balance comedy and storytelling and switching careers (and trying to get into graduate school a little bit). It's been challenging, but in a necessary and good way. Tomorrow I'll run my 8th Staten Island Half Marathon. Maybe I'll write about it after and maybe I won't.

Hopefully I will.