After the stroke I'd been left with right sided paralysis, all my right sided muscles being wiped of all strength, arms, legs, foot, toe and torso.
After 3 months of recovery and rehab I really wanted to go out for a run. This wasn't something that I loved to do before hand but I felt I needed to prove to myself that I was could be as good as new
I went out with the idea of having a jog, I still had a bit of difficulty with walking, but not enough for me to have second thoughts. I started by walking slightly quicker and then thought about breaking into a jog.
The first few steps were very strange, my left side was working as normal but my right side felt very awkward. When taking a pace with my right foot I felt and pressure in every bones and joints of my lower left limb.
The feeling was not only very awkward but painful, my bones were feeling the impact and indirectly transferring this impact to joints and connecting bones. I initially described this as if my right leg was mad of wood, however a better description was like a very highly compact piece of rubber.
I realised that my suspension had been forgotten. My muscles either turned on or off, where as muscles don't often work at their full capacity and often work in conjunction with each other. If one muscled cannot work at the required capacity then another muscle automatically tries to help. In my situation my muscles didn't know how to restrict their output and all tried to work at their full capacity. This then caused the awkward sensations in my running.
I called this session to an abrupt halt, after no more than 50 metres. I wanted to run but knew that if I persisted I would be causing damage to my bones and limbs. I walked home wondering how I was going to train this leg and came up with an idea of going to the swimming pool.
I took to the pool the next day, taking the train and walking as I was unable to drive. Once in the water I wondered what I was going to do? Since the major problem was that I had no suspension I thought "Hop". So I took to the shallow end, using as much depth of water to be comfortable and proceeded to hop. I was going really well and went to the swimming pool 3 times a week. I proceeded to hop for 5 minutes, reducing the amount of depth and counted the amount of hops over a set distance. I also joined pensioners and unfit people in an aquasise class but this is another story.
After undertaking around 1 month of hopping in the water I decided to give running a go again as the scenery was going to be more exciting. I went out for the run and found that things had improved quite a bit, my lower limb felt like the piece of rubber had become more pliable, I still didn't have the suspension working properly and it felt as if it was 60% there.
I made a decision after the run that I'd give it another couple of goes and If there was very little or no improvement I'd go back in the pool, hopping again. Thankfully I felt slight improvement and continued jogging.
As well as the suspension issue my stride in both legs was smaller than normal. My calf muscle and achilles tendon suffered. I was stretching these out but out on one run I'd covered only about 500 metres and I had excruciating pain, so much so that I had to stop running and walked back. This led to a twice weekly visit for a sports massage. This was the most painful part in my whole rehab but after 3 weeks I was good to go again.
After starting work my jogs started to reduce and quickly reduced to zero. I went out for a jog at the weekend and it was amazing! I felt like I was 95% there, I'd improved through time and going to a personal trainer working on getting the muscles to work properly.
I have a charity run lined up on the 17th July, ( http://www.runmelbourne.com.au/cmspage.php?intid=199&intversion=7 ) I hope to be slightly better however even so happy that I can run around this circuit unlike many others that have had a stroke........... Wish me luck :o)
No comments:
Post a Comment