I recall a discussion in the locker room after cross country practice about a teammate I had never met.  I don’t recall his name, but this guy had graduated before I even got to college.  John, one of the well respected fifth year seniors said this guy wanted to go to NCAAs as part of the seven-man travel squad, but only “wanted to travel to the course, warm up with the team, and get a t-shirt.”  He did not want to actually run the race.  This guy never made the travel squad to NCAAs.  To him, and many others, it’s all about instant gratification without any of the work.  Running competitively isn’t like a movie where all the hard work is abstracted away and all that’s shown is the glorious win over the evil opponents.  To date, our team has qualified for every national meet since 1997, one of only five schools.   To do that takes considerable effort and years of training for hours every day.  You can’t just fast forward to the good parts.

The zeitgeist of today is marked by a lack of intrinsic motivation to undertake any long term efforts.  In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell cites James Flynn’s work on how Asian students work harder and longer on problems than their American counterparts.  Given a tough math problem, most American students will work on it for only a short while before giving up.  This ethos carries over into other areas.  An article in the New York Times states that 95 percent of blogs are abandoned, many of which only have one post.  The torrents of traffic and commenters envisioned by these blog posters just doesn’t happen overnight.  They think blogging fame will come immediately, but it doesn’t.  It takes time to build a reader base.  More to the point, the blog also has to have content that people are willing to read.  I’ll be surprised if many people read this post or others like it concerning my opinions and everyday life, but most of my traffic comes from my software troubleshooting/debugging and knee microfracture posts.  Even in my little corner of the Internet, I have made gradual traffic gains over the months.  People just don’t swarm in overnight:

Apparently, the same is true for Twitter: most users either abandon their account after signing up or just make one post.  Again, the problem boils down to effort: few are willing to make the effort and post meaningful content at frequent intervals.  Followers just don’t appear because you signed up.  Like blogs, it isn’t just the frequency of posts, but the value of the content: I really don’t care what you ate for lunch today.  I especially don’t care that you got a front row seat at the Apple Developer’s Conference after waiting in line since 4 AM.  Most Twitter posts aren’t much better than spam.  To attract followers, the posts have to carry some value to those beyond a small circle of friends.

Everyone just wants the massive blog readership or the Twitter following, but couldn’t care less about the content required to generate such traffic.   Sometimes, when the desired outcome can’t be achieved with lackluster efforts, many try to lower the bar.  Currently, there’s an effort in Virginia Beach to relax the public school grading scale from 7 point to 10 point.  Parents think this will even the playing field with other school systems that have switched to a 10 point scale, but it’s really just lowering the standards.  Parents want their kid to get in to his or her college of choice and to do it by studying less.  Also along these lines, a state representive recently proposed that more in state students should be accepted to Virginia public universities because a constituent complained that the acceptance standards were too tough and he didn’t get in.  I’m guessing that this “constituent” was probably the representative’s kid.  What is the real secret to getting in to your college of choice?  It isn’t done by getting easier As or by pushing out extremely well qualified out of state students.  Work harder, and anything can happen.

It’s pretty bad that so many people give up when they realize some effort is involved.  It’s worse when people lower their standards of success when their current efforts are clearly lacking.  Believe it or not, there are even worse characters out there that will do anything to get instant gratification: cheaters.  Instead of working hard for ten months researching state-of-the-art, tweaking out a system design, implementing the design, testing the design against existing works, and finally writing and submitting a research paper, some people are willing to cheat.  A recent study reports that an astounding  2% of researchers fake their results.  In a similar instance, some colleges are willing to fudge the statistics to improve their rankings.  They play with class sizes and give peer institutions poor reviews to improve their standing.  Instead of improving the school in an honest way, taking the time to hire more and better qualified faculty, increasing employee pay, and attracting better students, Clemson faked its way up 16 places in U.S. News reviews.

What is the real solution to this lack of motivation?  How can more people motivate themselves to post regularly on their blog?  How can people stick with something and work hard enough to achieve just rewards?  Some slick researchers tried paying students for earning good grades.  This approach improved state test scores by nearly 40 percentage points.  Did money provide the motivation for these students to work harder and longer on their math problems and not give up?  Apparently.  Proponents of this system argue that the “real world” functions much in this way: perform better and get paid more.  But money can’t be added as an outcome in every scenario.  How many blogs or Twitter accounts are raking in the dough?  Almost zero, I would guess.  Instead, people need intrinsic motivation to produce results over the long term.  I don’t write this post because I envision piles of Internet surfers reading and commenting on this.  I do it because there’s satisfaction in organizing my thoughts and ideas and writing them down.  I don’t care that nobody else will read this, but if someone else finds it interesting, then more power to them.

Aside from writing these inane blog posts, it is intrinsic motivation that keeps me working on long research projects.  It’s what gets me up in the morning with the hope that I’ll be able to run normally again after knee surgery.  I run slow, go out every other day,  only go ten minutes, and feel terrible, but I know if I do it enough I’ll be able to run faster and longer.  By keeping at it and going one step at a time, things will get done.

All I can say with certainty is that my knee hurts when I run.  I went about twenty or thirty steps before pain started somewhere around the joint.  I went about a minute, stopped and stretched, and then walked for a few more minutes before going again for another minute.  It wasn’t any better the second time around, and the pain seemed to get worse.  I haven’t had any serious knee pain in a very long time.  It doesn’t hurt when cycling: I can mash the pedals and ride up hills out of the saddle or sprint to beat a light and I have no pain at all.  It doesn’t hurt when I climb stairs, nor do I feel any popping or locking that I used to.  It still doesn’t hurt when I put in the clutch to shift in my car.

While running for the first time since November or December felt awkward, the pain eclipsed any biomechanical weirdness.  Run enough, and the biomechanics will smooth out.  Oddly during a recent practice, one of my old teammates told me that my coach gave me as an example of good running form.  I think that’s the first time I’ve ever heard someone comment on that.  It’s like saying I’ve got great coordination — I struggle just to get my feet in the bicycle clips.

It feels as though the pain is in a different place than last July when the knee pain took me out.  Since it’s been so long since last July when I experienced the knee pain while running, my perceptions of how things feel have been invalidated.  That said, last July, I could tell that the pain came from a very specific place right next to the kneecap and that it was deep in the joint.  This time it seems more spread out, more to the surface, and more lateral in its location.  I had occasional pain similar to this at PT when the leg brace came off, and the PT told me it was my IT band.  It could be my IT band, but when my teammate who eventually had microfracture first started feeling pain, he thought it was his IT band too.

The pain really comes down to one of two sources: either the microfracture failed to produce enough fibrocartilage to protect my knee from the impact of running, or it’s something soft tissue that I can deal with.  Since the doctor and PT were extremely optimistic that the microfracture worked and that the cause of my pain was most likely from my IT band, I will first try dealing with this as a soft tissue problem.  That means loads of stretching to try to smooth stuff out.  I am not without precedent: when one guy with torn cartilage and microfracture first started running in the early winter, he experienced a lot of pain like I am now.   Now he is running six, seven miles a day and the pain is much more manageable or even nonexistent on some days.  Initially, I thought he was crazy the way he talked about running in excruciating pain, but it appears as though the pain wasn’t from the torn cartilage.  At least not if he is feeling better while running more.

I can say that I am feeling a lot better overall than even before the surgery.  I can go harder and longer on the bike than I could before.  I can go almost two hours before I start to feel tired, while last summer I would be exhausted if I went that far.  I can now power up hills that previously left me in the lowest gear and I can take on someone who passes me, when previously I would struggle just to stay on their wheel.

I will try to run small amounts as much as I can and see if this pain is manageable, while hopefully not making things worse.

I think I’ve got about 10,000 lines that I’ve written for this over the past few months, which easily surpasses anything I’ve worked on before.  Nearly every week I’ve made significant changes to existing code and added in a lot of new stuff.  Something of this size in a constant state of change is a new challenge to me.

Consequently, I’ve taken a lot of steps to keep everything organized since I can’t do it in my head.  Since the code is mostly in Java, I’ve done my best to take advantage of its object oriented nature.  I try to keep things as loosely coupled as possible so that when I’ve got to make some modifications, it doesn’t screw everything.  I’ve made use of Java packages to group stuff together that has similar functions.  On top of all that, I’ve put the project into a Subversion repository so I can always go back to old stuff and so that I can work on it from multiple machines without it being a huge headache.

Of course, this is standard procedure for any programmer, but until now it’s never been absolutely necessary for any projects I’ve worked on alone.  During my internships, I had worked on stuff that was in the tens of thousands of lines, but it had been contributed to by other people.  Good programming practices made sense since other people would be working with my code and vice versa.  With what I’m working on now, it’s almost as if some of the stuff was written by someone else.  I’ll come across a method that I wrote two months ago and not remember much of how it worked.  I feel like a one man programming team.  I recall an interview of Bjarne Stroustrup that complained about grad students that would work on their own projects and write terrible code, not expecting that later on it would be needed for another project or possibly released to others.  I’d rather not fall into that trap since the stuff I’m working on now will likely see plenty of use in the future.

Increased comprehensiveness is one reason they say that Extreme Programming is so valuable — having someone else there with you really helps in making something that not only works, but is built in such a way that everyone can understand it.  Some people, including myself, can often write something that is almost completely unintelligible to others.  Knowing this is one reason I like to avoid cramming several actions into one line, for which I’ve gotten grief from others about being “verbose”.  I’d rather be verbose, but understandable than concise ambiguous.  I’ve never understood why people brag about writing a program in as few lines as possible, usually in some loosely-typed scripting language.  For part of this project, I had to use someone else’s MATLAB script to convert some trace data.  Of course, they crammed the conversion code into about fifteen lines that took me forever to figure out what it did (partly because I’ve never used MATLAB).  Not wanting to revisit that, I translated the code into Java in a more drawn out format so it would integrate well with the rest of my project.

I’m sure there are plenty of things I could do to make my code more better than it is now, but it’s hard to improve when there isn’t someone to give you feedback.  I can learn from my successes and mistakes from previous projects when working on my current project, however.  It seems as if most good programming practices don’t matter so much when the code size is small, but when a threshold is crossed, they seem to go from irrelevant to absolutely necessary.

Now it’s one year later on a similarly cold day and I’m on the other side. After a long period of pain and wondering what I had done to my knee, to the cartilage tear diagnosis and buildup to the surgery, the weeks of non-weight bearing, the months of wearing a brace, and finally biking again, I’ve come nearly full circle. A few of the guys on the team asked yesterday when I’ll be tying up the ol’ running shoes again. One even asked about racing plans. Not so fast…

My goal is to start once the weather gets warmer — the cold is probably one of the factors that led to my problems in the first place. The worst of all my previous running injuries started in the winter. I really also don’t care for freezing my butt off outside when I can bike inside. A part of me doesn’t want to start at all in fear that I’ll be in pain. I would almost rather just have the hope that I can run again versus the fear that I’ll never be able to.

I have a hard time believing it’s been a year since all this went down. I feel a lot better now than I did then, especially knowing what was wrong with me. I waited for months until the pain and irritation got so bad to go to the doctor, but there wasn’t a day that I wondered why my knee gave me such trouble. I remember clearly the day I hurt it, getting into the car and feeling unbearable pain each time I put in the clutch. Stairs were a nightmare, and even extending my leg when sitting down was pretty bad. At the least, I know what happened and I’ve tried to get it fixed. It’s possible with advances in stem cell research that I could get an injection that would regrow my lost cartilage to its pre-tear state. I could go back to running as if nothing ever happened. Now, I’ll be satisfied if I can get out the door a few times a week for a couple of miles.

I’m really starting to face the reality that I’m getting older. I know I’m not that old, but most of the doctors I’ve seen for various running injuries have told me that I’m not an invincible high schooler anymore. Stuff is going to wear me down more than it used to and I’ve got to pay attention.  My coach calls them “old man” injuries. I even get called “old man” when I occasionally drop by at practice.

I guess this just boils down to the fact that I wish that I didn’t have to worry about coming apart at the seams. Ray Kurzweil goes on about how much of a PITA it is to give our bodies constant attention and to still have them break down on us — that a better solution is needed than just advances in medical technology. I really can’t stand to have to dedicate so much time to bodily upkeep when I could be doing something else. Imagine how many more interesting things we could be doing instead of having to sleep, eat, drink, brush our teeth, and handle other annoying bodily functions. They always seem to get in the way when I want to put my attention elsewhere.

Though uploading my consciousness into a computer as a program sounds like a radical idea, it would certainly take care of most of these annoyances. The question would then become one of experience: would existing as a computer program provide the same sensory experience, satisfaction, and overall quality of life as in a real body? I’m not sure. At this point I would have to say no, but maybe a few more years of aging will change that.

I would really like to get back into more games, but I just can’t see myself throwing out $2000 for a computer that I would use exclusively for games and be unable to carry around anywhere without a lot of effort.  It just isn’t worth it anymore.  So, I’m pretty sure I’m going to get an Xbox.

It seems that a real shift is taking place with developers placing emphasis on console games over PC, making most PC games a buggy port of their console counterparts.  Most new PC games are packed with nasty copy protection rootkits that are nearly impossible to remove.  Finally, new PC games all seem to have extremely steep system requirements, meaning you have to undertake a massive and expensive upgrade in order to get acceptable performance.  All these are things I don’t want to deal with, especially when I can get a top of the line Xbox for less than the price of a halfway decent video card.

My main concern over console games is the controller.  I started on PC games and feel natural with keyboard and mouse.  At my height of gaming, I became one with the computer, leveling the crosshairs on an opponent and blasting away without the slightest thought of what keys to press and how much to move the mouse.  I’ve played on a fair number of consoles and I’ve never adjusted to the controllers.  I always feel sluggish and usually have to remember where the buttons are and what they do.  Because of the controller, many RTS and simulation games are exclusively developed for the PC, which is a drawback in and of itself.

Regardless, I think I’m going to make the switch anyway.  With enough practice, I can adjust to the controller.  It’s also going to be a huge cost savings since it’s far easier to shell out $400 every four or five years for a new console compared to several thousand for PC upgrades.  The additional money for PC upgrades would be more justifiable if I were to use the computer for work, but Windows is useless for development and the lack of portability is also detracting.

This leads into my proposed setup: get a new monitor with DVI and DisplayPort for my laptops and HDMI input for consoles.  This way I can use the monitor for computing and for games.  My current external monitor has a 4:3 aspect ratio with only one digital input and I would also prefer something widescreen.  With only one digital input, it’s a real pain when I want to switch the Mac laptop for the Linux one or on the rare occasion that I want to boot up the desktop.

It seems that 16:9 1080p monitors are rare and are pretty limited in terms of functionality.  The only one that remotely interests me is the Dell S2409W and I’ve it uses the poor quality TN panel which gets a lot of complaints. It may be okay for the Xbox, but I don’t know about using it with the computers.  So, it seems 16:9 monitors are out since all the other ones I can find are also TN panels.  Larger 30+ in TV-style monitors are also out since the cheapest of those runs about $800, which is out of my price range, especially for something that may not fare well as a computer monitor several feet from my face.

So, this means PC-oriented 16:10 aspect monitors.  I would prefer something at least 24 inches and I can’t really get anything with a resolution greater than 1920 x 1200 since my laptops have terrible video cards.  Being 16:10, it means that when I plug in the Xbox, I’ll get 100 pixel black bars on the bottom and top of the screen, but that’s something I can live with since the screen will be large enough.  Two 16:10 monitors interest me: the Dell 2408WFP and the HP LP2475W.  Of those, the HP seems the better buy since its panel is the highly coveted IPS and it also seems to be nearly $100 cheaper depending on the vendor.  Both have an HDMI input, two DVI inputs, and a DisplayPort input.

Then, I can pick up a Pro Xbox for about $300.  I can’t see the advantage of the Elite except for the 120 GB hard drive (vs. 60 on the Pro).  Games are a bit more on the expensive side compared to the PC, but it’s probably all worth it not having to worry too much about endless installs, wasted hard drive space, and hardware-specific bugs.

So, I get an XBox Pro for about $300 and a 24 inch monitor for about $600, which is quite the savings over a massive PC upgrade.  But there’s one problem: sound.  Consoles are oriented towards those with dedicated 7.1 surround receivers to make it sound like a battle is being fought in the room.  I don’t have that — I would prefer to just plug in some headphones, but the Xbox doesn’t have a headphone jack.  This leaves me with three options, none of which I really care for:

1) Get a receiver.  My dad’s got an old receiver that could handle the analog AV from the Xbox.  I would really like to avoid this because it means yet another large piece of electronic junk sitting in my room.  Furthermore, it would do nothing except provide me with a headphone jack for my games.  This seems like a waste.

2) Connect the analog AV cables from the Xbox to a pair of headphones with some adapters.  This isn’t really a good option either since there is no way to control the volume.  I’ve heard of at least one person doing this and having it work, but as he said, there’s no volume control.  You’re just stuck at whatever volume the Xbox puts out.

3) Connect the analog AV cables to the line in on my Macbook.  I can also do this with some adapters and then plug the headphones into the Macbook and use the laptop as an amplifier.  I’m not sure how well this would work either in terms of losing signal clarity and whines from the laptop making their way into my headphones.  Also, I’m not even sure if the line in on the Macbook is stereo.  I really don’t care about surround on headphones, but I would at least like to have stereo.

At this point, the third option is probably the best bet, and if that doesn’t work, try the others.  I can’t seem to find many others on the Internet with this kind of setup.  Most who use a PC monitor with their console still connect their sound to a dedicated receiver or a powered set of PC speakers.

I’ll probably wind up doing more research before I settle on something.  Or, I might just forget it if it really looks like this won’t work.

I still have occasional pain in my left knee, which is probably just the IT band again, but sometimes I think I feel something in the joint.  I’ve been stretching more after biking to help keep everything loose before I get in front of the computer for most of the day.  I spend about 15 minutes or so now, which is better than when I first started biking, where some days I wouldn’t stretch at all.  I really should do more so that I can adjust better if I bike more or start running.  If I start biking on the roads for any significant amount of time or add in running, I could be in trouble with not stretching enough.  Plenty of typical soft tissue injuries could be in store for me if I don’t watch out.

I drove the Mustang again yesterday for the second time since I’ve had the surgery.  I’m planning on driving it again more now that I can handle it, but it still has me worried whenever I put my foot on the clutch.  Each time I even touch the clutch I think about the popping and pain that ensued prior to the surgery.  It’s like going down stairs was for awhile.  I just have to overcome the fear, but at the same time I wonder if the clutch is going to wear down the fibrocartilage in my knee in the same way that running might.  I will gradually drive it more and see how it goes.  I may throw in the towel if I start to get discomfort.

Another Flat Hat article got my attention, this time about the difficulties of performing well in school while competing in intercollegiate sports.  The author, a student-athlete, states that here at William and Mary, a divide exists between athletes and non-athletes.  From my experience and the author’s, this divide seems to exist for two reasons.

The first reason is that due to time constraints between school and practice/traveling for competition, athletes self-segregate from other students.  Going to class, practice, and doing homework consumed all my (and my teammates’) time and energy, leaving almost no time for any kind of social life.  What little free time we had was spent with our roommates, who were also teammates.  Living, studying, sleeping, eating, traveling, suffering through workouts, and showering with 40 other guys was enough of a social activity that we didn’t need anyone else.  In fact, very few of us had friends or even girlfriends who were not on the team.  Anyone who hung out with other non-teammate friends was seen as the odd one out.

Those who wanted to do well in races and in school didn’t do much else except practice and study.  If you tried to squeeze in late night parties every week, your performances in school and running suffered.  I’ve seen this happen to several teammates, who tried going out on weekends only to bomb tests and races.  Anyone who wanted to compete effectively without hurting their grades had to make some sacrifices.  Consequently, a lot of non-athletes see us as weird.  My sister says my teammates stick out in the already nerdy William and Mary population like a sore thumb: “they’re skinny, don’t drink, have a shaved head…”

Since high school, my coaches have always said that we are students first and athletes second.  If school is taking a hit, we should back off on the running.  For me, it never came to that, but a few teammates during my five years of eligibility did quit the team citing academics.  Nearly everyone on the team set high standards for themselves academically, and few failed to hit these standards.  Almost everyone on the team that’s graduated since I’ve been here has gone on to graduate school of some sort, many to law or medical school.  There aren’t many student-athletes at William and Mary that I’ve met that haven’t done well academically, but this high level of academic performance seems to be the exception, rather than the norm.

At other schools, student-athletes really do seem to live up to the “dumb jock on scholarship” stereotype.  USA Today reported on how nearly all student-athletes on DI football and basketball teams major in the same discipline, usually something like “social sciences,” or “management.”  They pick the easy way out to keep their grades high enough to compete and somehow many of them still fail to graduate.  This is where NCAA policy should really push towards getting a useful degree not just “majoring in eligibility.”  Those that do graduate “have been hesitant to cite their degree on job applications,” since their major was worthless.

The thought of incompetent athletes flunking out of the easiest classes really hits a nerve with the average William and Mary student, who most likely busts his or her butt to get through Organic Chemistry.  Odds are that student’s classmates are also members of the basketball, tennis, track, and football teams, among others.  William and Mary boasts a nearly 100 percent graduation rate with all of its teams and 36 Academic All-Americans since 1992.

Money is the second reason for the athlete and non-athlete divide.  In the comments section of the article, a lot of students believe that the teams at William and Mary get their budgets and athletic scholarships entirely from the $1,259 per year athletic fee tacked on to tuition.  They feel cheated that their tuition money is going to pay for others’ athletic scholarships.  This is hardly the case.  All athletic scholarships are funded from endowments and alumni donations, not from tuition.  Without a strong alumni base, the athletic programs would be nonexistent.  One commenter mused that he wasn’t able to use the athletic fields or run on the new track because priority went to athletic teams.  Again, those fields and the new track were paid entirely by alumni donations, which specified their use for athletics.  With respect with complaints about the athletic fee in general, there are plenty of fees that I pay in my tuition that go towards school programs that I never took advantage of.  There are also plenty of government programs that I pay for in my taxes that I never use, either.

To me, non-athletes complain about athletic scholarships in the same manner that out-of-state students complain about in-state tuition.  Out-of-state students had a choice to attend a public school in their own state and pay less money, but they didn’t (they also don’t pay VA state tax).  Non-athletes had a choice to work hard in a sport in high school and potentially get an athletic scholarship, but they didn’t.  As for athletic slotting, plenty of non-athletes get accepted in the same manner, but due to their socioeconomic status.

At William and Mary, we have our cake and eat it too.  We can be successful students while kicking butt as athletes.

Then, I got to college and faced the experience of eating in the dining halls.  Our entire cross country team would pile into the Caf every night after practice and sit in the same cluster of tables.  Most of the time, we were exhausted from whatever workout or long run we had done that day and were dying for food.  Of course, the stingy workers would only hand out a few pellets of nasty roast beef or a few noodles of pasta after standing in line for ten minutes.  We were starving — give us more!

“Get back in line,” the workers retorted.

Thus, after whatever inhaling whatever meager rations the Caf workers gave us, everyone on the team finished their dinner with a nightly ritual: cereal.  Cereal wasn’t portion controlled by the miserly Caf workers, so we ate a lot of it.  When I first arrived as a freshman, I couldn’t believe everyone else ate cereal for dinner.  It seemed so out of place, but soon enough, I found myself doing it every night along with the rest of my teammates.

The Caf always had Kellog’s granola, which in some way or another became my cereal of choice for breakfast and dinner.  A bowl of it in the morning gave me most of the energy I needed to get through a day of class and practice.  It was also great after plenty of grueling workouts.  So, I not only ate cereal with almost every meal, but I became addicted to granola.

At first, I stuck to the Kellog’s brand, which I ate at the Caf.  It wasn’t until my sophomore year that I discovered bulk granolas in the grocery stores, while a few years later I found Trader Joe’s, which sold the same bulk granolas as well as other granola-based cereals for cheap.  All the while I continued to eat cereal for dinner while at school: my parents would have a fit if I did that at home.  Then, after screwing around on the Internet, I found that it was easy to make your own granola with a minimum of ingredients.  I found a great recipe here and also here, but my version is as follows:

Preheat oven to 275 and combine the following in a large mixing bowl:

• 4 cups rolled oats
• 1 cup pecans
• 1/3 cup, heaping, packed brown sugar
• pinch of salt
• 4 tsp canola oil
• 1 cup pure maple syrup (I use Grade B, but Grade A Dark Amber is also good)

Place on a cookie sheet with cooking spray.  Bake for about 40 minutes, stirring every 10-15 minutes to allow the edges and center to dry evenly.  When the oats turn golden brown and the syrup has been absorbed, it’s done.

Since I don’t eat in the dining halls anymore, I wonder if my old teammates still finish off every dinner in the Caf with a bowl of cereal.

I knew that he had some kind of knee issue that required surgery and a long recovery but I wasn’t sure that it was microfracture.  It happened to him during the summer after my junior year of undergraduate while he was a freshman.  I remember talking to my coach over the summer about how everyone was doing and he mentioned my teammate as having some kind of major knee issue that had to do with the cartilage.  I remember returning to school and practice in the fall and seeing him do his therapy in the athletic training room.  Every time I went in there to get some ice or stretch, he was in there on the bike or doing some kind of exercises.  There were plenty of times I remember being in there and he wasn’t having a good time or something was hurting and the trainers were telling him to take it easy; that there were good days and bad days.  Finally, I don’t remember seeing my teammate doing workouts again until March of my senior year — he started having issues in April or May of the previous year, so it was quite awhile before he was back to training normally again.

I didn’t really think too much of it — when I was healthy and running well I tended to forget about those on the team that were injured.  They went to the meetings at the beginning of practice and then I didn’t see them until I was stretching or in the shower.  Usually I only really paid attention when someone I ran with regularly on maintenance runs or as part of a workout group suddenly disappeared one day.  I would be aware that they were injured for a few runs or workouts and then it would kind of slip my mind as I got used to them not being around.  Of course, when I was the one that was injured, which happened at least once per season, I always seemed aware of everyone else that was hurt.  We all spent plenty of time in the training room trying to get better.  Overall, I spent most of my worrying about trying to stave off or heal my own injuries. It seemed that some tendon or muscle was always about to take me out of the lineup, was in the process of keeping me from running, or trying to blow up again as I restarted training.  Of course, once one problem was on its way out, something else was desperately trying to start up.

Unlike me, my teammate said there wasn’t anything that he remembered as the cause of his cartilage defect.  His doctor said he probably ran into something, but he didn’t remember doing anything like that.  One day he remembered running a steeple race and being fine, and the next day on a long run the pain started.  It slowly got worse for awhile as our coach told him the problem was an IT band injury.  After a lot of stretching and no improvement he went in to see a doctor at home, which eventually led to his diagnosis.

His defect must have been more weight bearing than mine, as he said that it hurt when he walked, whereas mine didn’t.  Like me, my teammate also had a lot of popping and locking in the joint with every leg extension.  Before the surgery, his doctor told him that the microfracture-induced fibrocartilage would most likely last about three or four years, enough to get him through his college career, but after that it might break down.  My doctor didn’t really say this, but this short-term success seems to be the general assessment on the Internet.  He (and my PT) have said that the tissue will break down faster if I return to hard training, so I’m not really inclined to do that.

During the surgery, the doctor had to move my teammate’s patella so that it wouldn’t rub against the microfracture area.  The idea was so that bending the knee wouldn’t scrape away the fibrocartilage-forming clot.  I was kept in a motion-limiting brace to prevent this from happening for the first couple weeks, but I didn’t have my whole patella adjusted.  He said the defect area was about the size of a thumbnail, which seems to be smaller than the area I had that was more like two thumbnails.  My teammate said that he didn’t have any pain in the microfracture area after the surgery but he could feel something in there sometimes.  Following the surgery, he was on crutches for about five weeks, biking at about two months, and then started running at about five months.  It was about seven months before running seemed more normal.  He also remarked that his leg strength didn’t come back until nearly a year after the surgery and even today, four years after, the bad leg still seems smaller.  He still can’t squat on his bad leg either.

My teammate remarked that I should really focus on abductor and adductor exercises which the PT really has me focus on.  It’s one of the things I work on during my morning routine.  He remarked on this because he had a lot of tendinitis issues as he returned to running that would have been lessened with more leg strength.  Other than that, my teammate made it through the last two and a half years of his college career successfully and wasn’t held back by his knee.  His mileage was high and he did all the workouts and raced well.  I remember running with him through some of the more treacherous trails around here last year, so I know his knee could definitely tolerate trail running.  He still ran 50 miles a week through the summer and is still doing well today.  It’s great to hear that his microfracture procedure and recovery were a complete success and it’s a good motivational tool.  Since I don’t have to worry about burning eligibility or missing races, I can take it easy during my recovery and not force anything.  As I’ve mentioned before, just being able to run again to some degree will make my surgery a complete success.

It turns out that one of my teammates did have microfracture surgery before and at the end of his 6+ month recovery, he was running and working out again with everyone else. It took a lot of work to get back into shape, but he did it and is still running without problems today. Tomorrow I am supposed to meet with the orthopedic surgeon to sign some paperwork and try to figure out what will happen in the days/weeks/months following the surgery.

My cell phone was slowly breaking down over the last few months and finally seemed to give up the ghost yesterday. Aside from the 10-15 minute battery life, it had gradually been unable to connect with the cell network. For awhile, it would randomly lose and reconnect with the network, but yesterday it was “No Service” everywhere I went while everyone else I saw was yakking it up. Normally I don’t talk on the phone very much, but when I’m out on the bike or driving somewhere and something breaks down, it’s good to have. I’ll have to figure out what to do about this and I am not sure I want to plunk down more money for something that’s intentionally designed to wear out after a few years. I really just want something that can make calls and has a long battery life; all that other crap like pictures, video, unwieldy web browsing, and text messaging I have no need for.

Yesterday my mom dropped by and we took the ferry to Surry and tried going to a barbecue place for dinner. Naturally, it was closed on Tuesdays. An hour of driving and the ferry trip and there wasn’t much else out there, except for the Virginia Diner, so we went there instead. It wasn’t bad, but not all that great either. I’ve seen that place while driving by on 460 several times, but never ate anything there. We’ve stopped a few times to buy some of the peanuts and peanut brittle they have, but never the food.

As we drove through Surry county, I saw lots of signs and bumper stickers reading “No OLF” in giant red letters, protesting one of the potential sites for the Navy outlying landing field for all the planes at Oceana and Cherry Point to practice landings. A much bigger protest has been going on in Northeastern NC for a lot longer since that was the Navy’s first choice. My mom said she couldn’t blame them for protesting it since a lot of people live out in the middle of nowhere to avoid stuff like that, but the funny thing is that is the same reason why the Navy wants to build there in the first place: there’s nothing around. For over 20 years I’ve lived within 5 miles of Oceana and the jets flying around at all hours never really bothered me. In fact, I sleep way better at home than I ever do in Williamsburg, where it’s usually quiet. Sometimes the quiet seems kind of unnerving because I almost expect there to be some kind of background noise of planes flying and cars driving down the nearby highways. It’s probably why Williamsburg seems so tired to me. That said, I can’t really fault the people in Surry for protesting either since they were there first and live there so they don’t have to deal with the noise and irritations of living in the close quarters of a city. If I were one of them, I would feel the same way.

I have only a few more days to enjoy my freedom of movement, and then I’ll be confined to crutches. I’m still biking as much as I can and walking everywhere I can too. Not being able to do much else will allow me to spend more time with school, but it’s good to have a break. Following a few weeks of downtime, then the real challenge of recovery begins. It’s always way harder to recover from an injury than it is to manifest one or take the initial time off after getting one. In the meantime, I’ll try to enjoy what I’ve got.