Dealing While Healing: Thoughts from Dimity

Swimming: the best place for me right now. Water supports my body, staring at the black line clears my mind.

Sunday afternoon, and I’m beginning to come down from a whirlwind: three days at the Richmond Marathon to celebrate Better Together capped off by senior night for Amelia, my daughter who is winding down her ten-year volleyball career.

At noon, I have an interview for The Final Miles, the book I’m writing about transitioning out of your running career. Mentally, I plan my next steps after that: done by 1 pm at the latest, drive to the Y, and be in the pool by 1:30, which gives me a full hour to swim. I am so well prepared, I even top off my travel shampoo and conditioner bottles prior to the interview so I can just grab my bag and go.

The interview goes well. I get to the Y, beeline for the locker room, and change into my suit, stuffing my towel, clothes, and jacket in a locker. Just as I’m closing it, a woman who I greeted me as I came in says, “Oh, you’re swimming? The pool just closed.”

“Really? Are you sure?” I ask. I had checked the pool hours on the app that morning and was positive it closed at 2:30. A lifeguard steps out of a bathroom stall, and confirms that yes, the pool is now closed, and it closes at 1:30 every Sunday. So much for my memory.

I have not done any real exercise since Thursday morning, when I hopped on the Peloton at the swanky hotel gym in Richmond. That’s three full days of not working out. Granted, they were three packed days with an expo, live podcast, and travel, which might lead you to believe I didn’t need to exercise, but quite the opposite is true: the busier my day is, the more I benefit from movement. (Let’s be honest: I benefit from movement on a nearly daily basis.)

After three days of feeling a little ungrounded, I needed to swim to cleanse my palate, get my blood flowing, shake out the travel blahs, and yes, remind myself that I’m still an athlete even if I couldn’t participate in Richmond.

I get back in my car, and the tears start. I go into pity mode: Why is everything so hard for me these days? I just want to swim. I just want to exercise. FFS, why can’t something just go my way?

Two years ago, I would’ve pivoted and headed down to the Highline Canal for a long walk. A three or four-mile walk would have good enough. But I’ve been dealing with some lower back/glute/sciatica issues for the better part of a year, and the two things that flare it up the most are, unfortunately, walking and standing.

So a walk is out; even 15 minutes at a slow pace is intolerable. Lately, I can walk for about 2-3 minutes, and then my sciatic nerve starts corkscrewing, tightening up the tension with each step and lighting both legs up with pain.

These days, I’m on what feels like Plan #74B to mitigate this situation. Its focus is on limited exercise: easy spins on the bike, swimming, very little in the weight room, and what I affectionately call My Exercises, a daily combination of foam rolling, digging with a lacrosse ball, and PT-based exercises designed to help me find space in my spine.

When I go to the gym at the chiropractor’s office, I get to add on a few small, supervised moves: half squats against a wall, side planks on my knees, pallof press with limited range. (I still teach spinning two times a week, keeping my bike’s resistance easy as I instruct others to crank it up; I also still teach strength but instead of playing along, I demonstrate then cheer lead.)

I have been very diligent in following Plan #74B, which started toward the end of October. Even though it’s only been about four weeks—and patience is not my strength, I absolutely acknowledge—I’m both disappointed and not surprised that it, like everything else, offers only a slice of relief.

My Coros in its current resting space: my dresser junk drawer.

Plans #1-74A included regular physical therapy; pelvic floor physical therapy; dry needling; massage; hi-tech lasers; a two-week course of prescription-strength ibuprofen; extra fish oil, avocado, and other healthy fats to ease inflammation; doing this video on repeat (and then doing a deep dive into the other YouTube videos that come up with the search term stenosis and sciatica relief); and trading my Coros for a regular watch so I could no longer obsess about how I was losing fitness, not burning enough calories, lowering my average daily step by the day.

I thought I’d permanently removed myself from this injury cycle when I stopped running, but apparently the universe had other plans. The bonus? Being back in a place where things I love to do—walk the dogs, wobble during a single-leg deadlift, sweat buckets on my bike—aren’t currently available is a good spot to be, perspective-wise, as I continue to put together The Final Miles. I don’t have to rely on memory to recount how devastating it is when you all you want to do is just sweat and move when your body won’t allow it. I feel that frustration acutely.

I also feel the anxiety about what this means for my future. When I’m standing at the kitchen counter, chopping veggies, and my legs are flashing with pain, I can spiral pretty quickly: if I can’t walk the dogs for 15 minutes on a flat sidewalk, will I ever be able to hike up a mountain again? If sitting on my road bike seat flares things up, is my future an upright eBike with a fat padded seat?

As athletes, we are so great at celebrating the wins: the PRs, the green boxes in Training Peaks, the faster times and stronger muscles. Don’t get me wrong: I love to see the victorious arms-up, finish line pose with smiles ridiculously wide, legs ridiculously tired. But I also have talked to plenty of women who are in a space where a finish-line pose—heck, even a good-old sweaty selfie—feels like it might never happen again. It’s a scary place to be, and it’s even scarier when you feel alone.

I’m in that scary place right now, and I’m ready to share about it more than I usually do. I want to normalize the days when you feel frustrated, old, achy, envious, weary of doing Your Exercises. When you’re counting on that swim to hit the reset button, but the button is unexpectedly out of order and you are just over it all.

With that in mind, I am going to start documenting what I’m calling Dealing While Healing on my personal Instagram account (@dimityonthemove); it will also be shared via @themotherrunner. I’m going to aim for two weeks, and see if doing so is helpful to all of us in this position. If you’re a social media person—or you’re in a place where you’re Dealing While Healing—I hope you’ll check it out.

As I write this on Thursday, I want to be sure you know Wednesday was a positive day: at a doctor’s appointment, I was given a new anti-inflammatory prescription and an MRI order. Plan #74C is being added to the mix.

More importantly, the pool was open and I had a full lane to myself for 50 glorious minutes.