Lying to Myself

I’ve spent the last month working really hard at recovering from the last triathlon race first weekend in September. I set a goal to do NO running at all, which I achieved, though that may sound ridiculously easy. I also set a goal to decrease my daily physical pain levels and to work on not over-exercising. This has been MUCH HARDER than I anticipated. I thought that putting up a sign in my bathroom that said “The normal amount of pain is zero” and then having a daily practice of listing my pain from 0-10 each weekday would be successful at decreasing pain. It was and it wasn’t.

Let me explain. The first week, I did a pretty bad job at doing “easy” workouts. I thought that this would be simply a matter of using lower weights. I bumped each set back ten or twenty pounds and thought that would be sufficient. It was not. That week, I had pain levels between 3 and 4 all week, which wasn’t the goal and did not feel good. It was SLIGHTLY less pain than I’d been experiencing all summer as I tried to race half marathons and Olympic triathlons. I found it difficult to hold the grandbaby for very long and especially difficult to get up from the floor easily after playing with him.

The next week, I tried again to decrease pain. Instead of bumping weights back one iteration, I bumped them WAY back. I did a lot more yoga in my weight training workouts and I did a lot more body weight only exercises. I tried to do only one or two HARD sets in each workout. (If you are laughing at me, please STOP!) This has a little bit more success and I got down to 2 on the best day of the week.

The third week, I did less walking (mostly because of less break time at work) and I also focused on simply doing exercises as well as I could. I set a time for each workout and made myself stick to it (something I am often not great at). I finally started to see some improvement and got down to 1-2 pain level most days and a 0 on the day after my day off. My sports monitor told me that other measures were improving, including V02 max and heart rate variability and resting heart rate. OK, this was really starting to work!

This week, week 4, I went in for a long massage and got some feedback from my massage therapist, who has been treating me for over a year. Her opinion was that my neck and shoulder were improved on one side by a lot (this was the spot where my ribs had been popping out for several months earlier this year). But she said the other side was worse and when she was working on my lower back, she said it was really, really tight and she thought I must be in pain from that.

This was an important moment for me. What happened was that I had not felt ANY pain at all in my lower back for the whole month. Not until she started working it. And what I realized was that I have spent so many decades of my life ignoring pain that it is virtually impossible for me to notice it unless it is at a level that is screaming and that I literally cannot move. I have to work very very hard to notice mild to moderate amounts of pain. This is why, I suspect, it has taken four weeks of me doing very little exercise to notice a real difference in the pain levels.

Because I have been lying to myself. For a very long time. At a very high level. And I think what actually happened was that I was genuinely reducing my pain each week, but that I had lied to myself about what level of pain I was in from the first week. I was writing down 3-4, but it was probably more like a 7-8. I was just not acknowledging that to myself. Because I am used to pushing myself past all normal barriers to achieve the goals that I want.

I spent more time today thinking about how long it has been since I walked normally. In 2017, I started noticing Achilles pain and some family members told me that I walked with a noticeable limp (obviously, I also ran with that limp). I did a year of PT with a similar experience to what I felt the last month. I didn’t think my pain was noticeably decreasing. Now I look back on this and wonder if what was going on was simply that as my pain decreased and I worked on exercises and trying to stop pain, I became more aware of how bad the pain was. This made it feel to me like I wasn’t actually fixing the problem. And I gave up and just started running at insane levels again. Which led to, well, where I am today.

What I am now guessing is that 2017 wasn’t the actual time when I started having problems. It was just the time when I was unable to ignore the problems anymore because they were so bad that they made it impossible to move in any normal way. And because I didn’t really attend to them, they have been getting worse and worse and what my brain has done is basically try its best in the background to turn down the volume on my pain because there is so much of it that it is triaging and only making me aware of the very worst of the pain.

It is not actually that great to experience pain. But there are a lot of studies on how much worse it is for humans who are missing whatever part of the brain that interprets pain signals. It is very very bad for humans not to feel pain because pain is one of the most important survival signals that exists. And yet, I have spent the last several decades slowly trying to turn myself into a human who does not interpret pain signals with any attentiveness. It seems obviously a bad idea, and yet I did it. It helped me survive some very bad stuff. I’m not going to say that I wish I hadn’t learned how to do it. I guess I wish I hadn’t needed to learn how to do it, but I am here now.

What it seems is the real job of the present is less trying to get my pain to go down (although it is still that) and more trying to actually feel pain. No wonder this has not been a very fun month.