7/10/07 – Survival of the Least Injured

Today was PT #3. It started off well enough b/c I graduated from recumbent bike to treadmill for my warm up. Now mind you I only got to walk on the treadmill at a blistering 3.6 speed (which is like .25 miles an hour but whatev) and a 2.0 incline but its progress so, wahoo. Then we moved on to those band exercises, you know the giant rubber band things that you affix to the legs of chairs and then tug on them. Well I was assigned the yellow rubber band, the lowliest of the resistance bands. I was in the middle of my second set of 20 tugs when SNAPPEROO I broke the thing right in two. I thought my PT girl (I would tell you her name but again, not sure on the rules about putting other people’s names on the internet) was going to kill me but she just laughed and said “I guess you’re ready for the red band.” I was really holding out hope that I could go directly the blue band, but no dice.

Next up, the clockwise/counter clockwise exercises, which I suck at b/c my calf muscle is so atrophied that it can no longer push things in circles. This frustrates me beyond all words. Righty’s calf muscle shrunk a quarter inch after spending 2 weeks in the Darth Vader boot. I mean think about that, ¼ inch in 2 weeks. Doesn’t that seem like crazy excessive?

So, as I am sitting there struggling to push this round board on a ball in circles I said to my PT girl “Don’t you think it’s sort of evolutionarily backwards that it takes so much effort to build muscle and so little to lose it all? I mean back in the day when food wasn’t so easy to come by mr. caveman would have had to expend a lot of energy to get the food necessary to build the muscle necessary to get the food necessary to build the muscle ad infinitum. And if he happened to get tagged by a tiger and had to sit it out for a week the wham there goes all his muscle and his ability to get food” Yes, this is the sort of stuff that runs through my head when I am sitting there incapable of performing basic functions with my body. Well actually, this is just the sort of stuff that runs through my head pretty much non stop.

Anyway, you know what she said “Well it’s actually right in line with Darwin’s Survival of the Fittest. Those who are prone to injury eventually die out.” Then she smiled and said “Its time for your massage.” Calling what she did to me a “massage” is like calling ice buckets a “whirlpool.”