I noticed today when I had the brace off that my left calf is down to almost nothing. It’s going to be rough coming back. I’m not getting as much popping in the left knee as I was a few weeks ago, which makes me think that something has started to fill in the hole of missing cartilage.
Everyone else seems to be out doing stuff with their perfectly fine knees. My mom ran in the half marathon at the beach last weekend, my sister runs regularly and is playing in a rugby game next weekend. A few of the guys who were close to my year have continued to run and do some races — one guy I know posted pictures from a nasty 18 mile mountain pass run in Colorado. My roommate back at school has started to run again after a year off and is out exploring the area every day. I did hear that one of my old teammates who ran a solid marathon in the spring is still out with patella tendon issues, so I’m not alone.
I was up at school one day last week to see my adviser and I also stopped to talk with my old coach. It was great to talk to everyone, but I still wasn’t comfortable with being back at school. When I came back home, I was exhausted. Once I can walk again, things will be so much easier. At school, I had to plan how to get around without running into staircases or steep hills. All the doors to the buildings weigh ten tons and are almost impossible to open when on crutches. They also have those worthless anti-slam things on them that cause the door to close on you as soon as you try to go through it. Having the disabled parking placard helps a lot because otherwise, I’d be crutching for several miles to get to the office and to the hall when I went to see my coach. That said, here at home I still make an effort to get out each day and go around the block, which takes 15 – 20 minutes. It’s getting easier, but it still isn’t fun.
I’m starting on a new school project so work consists of looking for state-of-the-art papers. I don’t particularly enjoy reading research papers, but otherwise I’ll neither have many ideas for research nor will I know if the work or problems I am interested in has already been solved. I’m now officially a Ph.D. candidate so I won’t have to worry about taking any more classes. From here on out, it’s going to be research, which is exciting. Of course, success has a new meaning: it’s no longer the grades you get, but whether or not your work gets published. This is going to be hard. Of course, it’s still possible that I can graduate without publishing anything, but an employer would really think twice before hiring me if my research wasn’t that great. I could also start a business of my own, but that would probably mean that my work was sufficiently good (and published) that it would be worth selling.
There were a few unresolved issues with the paper we just submitted for review, but no matter how it turns out, it will be a good learning experience. The past six months or so have been a complete paradigm shift and there were so many new things that I picked up on that it will be a valuable lesson for what to do in the future.
Overall, a lot of things have happened that are different from “normal”. Not all of them are good (like the whole knee deal), but I can learn from everything.
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