Laura and I have never met but I consider her a great friend.  I’m so glad Heather introduced us.  It’s a blast chatting and keeping each other level headed when stressed out.  I asked her for a guest post while I’m out enjoying some fun with my cousins.

Take it away Laura!

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Hi readers! I’m Laura and I blog over at Becoming The Odd Duck. Cynthia is one of my favorite bloggers out there and one of my future Healthy Living Summit roommates!

One of the ways that Cynthia and I have really connected is we are both dealing with an injury right now. It’s been so wonderful to have someone to speak with that understands what I’m going through with restrictions on activity, physical therapy and losing a major outlet for my stress relief.

I strained the Iliacus tendon in my hip last August running in a 5K race. This is a really deep tendon that raises your leg and allows the leg to come out in front of you – which understandably is a main tendon used while running.

Unfortunately I have a really bad habit of avoiding things that cause me anxiety or stress, so I avoided dealing with the injury for months. The intense pain went way pretty quickly and I was left with a dull ache that hurt every time I ran. It wasn’t incapacitating pain and I ran many 5Ks and two 10K races since I sustained the injury. I ignored this pain until March of this year, when I decided I needed to seek out physical therapy and get better so I could train for a half marathon in October.

I will tell you right now, don’t do what I did. I ended up in physical therapy for about three months and also under the care of an orthopedist who told me I could only bike on a flat terrain or swim. No running, no spinning, no stepping, no elliptical for 8-12 weeks while my strained tendon healed. The doctor thinks I’ll be lucky to run a 5K by October and there’s basically no way I’ll run the half marathon without re-injuring myself.

Clearly I’ve been dealing with this for a while, but I was still very active before my exercise restriction and was able to drown the stress and anxiety of the injury out with intense exercise. Once the doctor removed those options for me, I started to feel really stressed out about everything.

Luckily for me, I’m coming to the end of my journey. I’ve just been cleared for activity and am working on building up my hip endurance on the elliptical right now. But what did I do in the past 3.5 months to battle this stress I felt? Here are a couple of tips that worked for me, though I will admit it was a really difficult time for me and my stress didn’t go completely away.

1. Deal with the injury: Obviously, you have to deal with the injury to avoid the stress of not knowing what is going on. If you feel you are injured – get to a DR right away. Bad news is better than no news when it comes to an injury because at least you can make a plan of how to precede and heal. I’ll never ever ignore an injury again.

2. Continue to participate in activity to the best of your ability: Literally, the day the DR restricted my activity I went out and bought a bike. Granted I had been considering it for a while, but I wanted to be able to continue exercising. I decided to walk all the 5Ks I had signed up to run before visiting the DR. I even recruited friends to walk with me so I wouldn’t feel lonely walking the course by myself. Continuing activity really helped me quell my stress.

3. Watch your food intake: I’m actively trying to lose weight and having exercise severely limited made me very nervous about my weight loss stopping or worse, gaining weight. I started to tightly watch my food intake and try to curb emotional eating and treats as much as possible. Did this always work? No, but I didn’t gain any weight in the past few months so I consider it successful overall.

4. Find an injured or previously injured friend: That’s how I’m here today! Cynthia and I have bonded over our conditions and I’ve found solace in knowing I’m not alone in this journey. It can be deeply annoying and troubling to talk to people who have never been injured before tell you, “everything will be okay.” Nothing against those people – but they don’t understand the way an injured friend does.

5. Seek out new hobbies: Honestly, this is probably the best tip I have for you. Find something to A) replace the time you spent exercising and B) distract you from eating or feeling bad for yourself or whatever it is you are doing. For me, I signed up for Goodreads and picked up reading. I’ve read almost 20 books since being side lined from exercise. I also have found home renovation projects to take on at home, which leave me feeling active but don’t irritate my injury.

These are just a few of the ways I’ve found to deal with my stress since I’ve been injured. If you are injured, just know you aren’t alone and both Cynthia and I definitely understand what you are going through. If you need a friend to talk to, please email me and I’d love to be a buddy to you while you work on recovery!

If you have any other tips for dealing with stress while injured, please leave them in the comments below so people can find new ways to get through a rough time.

Thanks Laura, I’ll be back with goals tomorrow.

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