Rehab and living with pain
“You have a tear in your menisci in your left knee. Since you have the same pain in your right knee, we can presume this applies to both knees. We can operate, but waiting times are very long and there´s no guarantee it will get better. So I suggest, since it doesn´t bother you when you sleep, to continue your rehab and if it is to painful, take painkillers.”
This news I got in March this year, 2024. I was already full on the rehab work. I had done it for a few years, since running ultra was often full of knee pain. And it helped. And when hauling tires for hours, sure, I got pain after awhile, but could live with it. Hannah had given me a really good rehab for the back of knee the workout and it had built all muscles around the knees stronger.
I am writing this, because I want to share this important discovery for me, you can even cross the Greenland Icecap with this issue! Sure, after hauling for 8-10 hours, especially the last hour I felt both knees stiffening up and getting down on both knees when it was time to put the tent up, took willpower. At times it was so bad I couldn´t bend down to put on my skis. So about a third of the nights I had to take pain killers. So all is possible!
As I am now preparing for a new venture, alpinism, I have changed my rehab for the knee training to suit this. Since mountaineering demands a lot of up and down, and I live in flat Skåne, the gym is the place for the training most of the time. See these two examples of training which I also see as rehab. Excerpts from a great book called Mountaineering – The Freedom of the Hills. A climbing bible. Flexibility is also high on the list, so it is something I do almost every morning.
I am sharing this to show that you can do pretty much everything, even with some pain, if you just put in the effort to do the needed rehab every day of you life. It can be done on and off, one has to do it all the time.
The gym has always been important to me. For turning in for alpinism, again since Skåne is flat, the stairmaster is very helpful. 2-3 hours a day does a lot of the job which is waiting ahead. No, I haven´t started that yet, I am targeting many hours of trailrunning ahead, once the rehab has been set up. Right now 12 km:s is max with out problems to sleep.
