For the love of …

I’m giving up squats and lunges. Huh?!? Today is Fat Tuesday. We feast, and then we focus on the season of Lent for the next 6 weeks. I typically don’t do a lot of ‘fasting,’ but this year, I’m aiming to enhance my personal time with God by not exercising. Let me explain. I spend a lot of time in the morning on personal care. Post-chemo/surgery, I went to PT/OT for 3 years to work on my shoulders, wrists, and knees/hips. Each round of therapy came with its own set of exercises to continue at home. I also love to exercise. Even when I was a teenager, I remember buying the Denise Austin VHS and the multi-colored step to go with it. Over the years, I’ve explored different exercise routines to figure out what works for me and how I can fit that into my day. My typical morning looks something like this:

6am: alarm goes off. Hit the snooze button several times unconsciously.

6:30am: husband gets out of the shower and reminds me it’s time to get up. Spend 5-10 minutes checking email and refreshing my Fitbit app.

6:40am: roll out of bed begrudgingly, do my wrist therapy exercises, make the bed

6:50am: get in the shower. Spend 20 minutes (washing &) trying to get all the knots out of my post-chemo hair

7:10am: turn the shower off and start my shoulder exercises to help my ROM (range of motion)

7:15am: spray/clean part of the shower. We have a beautifully tiled walk-in shower and I learned the hard way that if you aren’t diligent about cleaning it, it will take forever to clean once you get around to it. So I clean a little each day.

7:25am: 10 minutes of full-body ROM exercises, plus massaging my left arm where the lymph nodes were taken out to keep numbness at bay

7:35am: 5ish minutes of physical fitness plus stretching after. I’m proud of how flexible I am and don’t want to lose that (again)

7:40am: finish getting ready and race downstairs to swallow some supplements and pretend that’s a good breakfast.

Now let me tell you what happened 2 days ago. In the middle of the day, I was walking through my house about to go upstairs and my knee gave out. I could not put full weight on it and spent the rest of the day either limping from place to place or resting on the couch with my daughter’s hopefully-not-stretched-out-now knee brace. The first thing that popped in my head when this happened was a day in June 2020, a week before our family was leaving on our first of many annual vacations. I had already finished 9 rounds of Abraxane (a milder chemo) and had my first Red Devil chemo that week. That chemo sure earns its name. I was at work walking down a hallway and my hip gave out. The pain was so severe that I left work early in tears to go to the pharmacy and get heavy duty pain meds, in hopes that I could still go on vacation and not be confined to a wheelchair. Back to the present – so when my knee gave out, I knew I had to handle my body carefully.

All this to say, I need to stop prioritizing getting all my reps in if it means my body can’t handle it. This time can be better spent on daily devotions and trusting that my Healer will take care of me. So I’m taking a break from squats and lunges, getting up on time, and putting God at the beginning of my day. And in case you’re wondering – yes, I had donuts today for Fat Tuesday.