Category: The B’s Knees

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KIA: not just a car anymore

“Hello, my name is Shawn and I have a knee injury.”

It’s not a perfect comparison—there are no group meetings or sponsors—but I have been in rehab (i.e., physical therapy) for about two months and frequently feel the urge to relapse while watching my soccer team play. Then I bend my knee to a certain degree or twist my leg around and that urge goes away.

At least it did until last week. Before a game on Wednesday, I decided to help the keeper warm up by taking some shots on net. I felt okay after the first few times, so I started kicking the ball harder. Not as hard as possible, mind you—I thought keeping the ball in reach of the keeper was a little more important than powerfully sending it soaring up into the roof.

That five minutes or so felt great, but as the game progressed while I stood on the sideline, my knee started to let me know it was displeased. Very displeased. Ooh yeah, that was definitely a relapse. When I got home, I was having trouble walking up and down stairs again.

Thankfully, physical therapy has gone well enough that I recovered quickly and I’m doing all right. I went to the local YMCA today and rode on an exercise bike for about 20 minutes. I didn’t push myself really hard because I didn’t want to rupture anything, but after a semester of circuit training twice a week and then two months of not being able to work hard enough to break a sweat, those 20 minutes felt pretty good. As for my limping down the stairs towards the locker room afterward… I think it’s fair to say I haven’t graduated from KIA just yet.

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You got hurt how?!

I was playing soccer on Sunday morning and the team was doing well. We were passing the ball around, defending well, getting decent shots on net (which was really tiny, so the final score was only 3-1). What happened to me? Hell if I know. I took a shot at the goal from about 20 yards out—it wasn’t even a good shot—and when I landed, my right knee was displeased. That’s all. I called for a sub, limped off the field and bending that knee has hurt ever since.

It’s been an adventure trying to put on socks, sitting down on the toilet and getting into my car without hurting myself too much; I’m discovering new muscles that have been compensating for the ones I’m trying not to use; and I’m spending a lot of time “RICE”ing* my knee, but the worst part is simply how it happened. I shot the ball, I landed, ouch. No big collision, no battle scars, no decent story to go along with the limp. Just ouch.

In other news, I’ve been using some of my spare time to repost blog entries from years past. I was somewhere in the middle of September ’05 and have since moved up to February ’06. (Some people may be reading blog posts via RSS feed—since I’m editing the timestamp so the entries are appearing at the date when they were originally posted, you may or may not have been receiving said entries.) So it’s been… a while since I started shawnbakken.net and I’ve only caught up to the beginning of 2006 with the old stuff. At this rate, maybe I’ll have everything on here before the world ends in 2012.

There’s still about a week left of Movember and the MN Moustache Madmen and I are still accepting donations online, but I’m bending the rules slightly. In theory, we’re supposed to grow a mustache, but I opted for something a little less odd-looking and trimmed a week’s worth of growth down to a Van Dyke.

Three things:
1) The first person who makes a “Dick” joke in the comments section is getting punched in the groin.
2) You can follow the growth rate of my facial hair on my donation page, then check out Lance Armstrong’s efforts here. (Seriously, how could he be taking some kind of growth hormone if that’s all his upper lip can manage?)
3) I’m a tad depressed that I had my current style of facial hair during my senior year of high school, all through college and a few years beyond, but I’d always called it a goatee until I saw that website above. Sad, sad, sad…

That’s the scoop o’ the hour. If I don’t write another blog entry before then, I hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving and, if nothing else, be thankful for the Internet connection that allows you to read my random blatherings. As for me, I’ll be much more thankful when it doesn’t take so much effort to use the toilet, ’cause if I’m lowering myself down by supporting my weight with my hands and one slips… I won’t want to tell people how I got those battle scars.

[*RICE = rest, ice, compression and elevation, not heat rice by rubbing it between your hands and then slap it against the injured area like Mr. Miyagi in Karate Kid.]