Paleo And Healing: How Diet Makes A Difference

I didn't set out to become a case study of one, but coincidence dumped me here anyways. I've broken the same bone in the same place in the same arm two years in a row now. Common sense would say it's harder to heal from that injury the second time around, since tissues have already been damaged once. However, the first time I had to recover from this injury, I wasn't eating Paleo. Now I am.

I already posted about how bruises from my karate class fade within hours, clearly evidence that my body's ability to heal itself is greatly increased. But what about a fractured bone? The X-rays don't lie. It healed a lot faster this year (after 15 months of Paleo eating) than last year (back when I was eating a very "healthy" diet with lots of meat, veggies, and fruit, but that still included grains, legumes, and more sugar).

Here's what a radial head fracture looks like on a CT scan reconstruction (Note: this is not my arm, but my X-rays show a very similar fracture):

My orthopedist took a set of X-rays the week I broke it, and another set 3.5 weeks later. The bone was totally healed in that time. Many people are still wearing a cast, yet a month after breaking my arm I have near full mobility in the joint and a pretty decent amount of strength. Of course, I'm not testing that by doing anything too crazy (if you don't count a 1.5 mile lake swim as crazy, that is), but all in all the arm feels remarkably good. Last year's bone break did not heal near this easily, and I needed a lot of physical therapy to get to the point that I already feel I'm at now.

How many times have you heard "You are what you eat"? As it turns out, it's true. Feeling vibrant, full of energy, quick to recover, and easy to heal is our human heritage. The fact that most modern humans feel tired, wrung out, sick, or have to turn to the myriad drug offerings that litter our magazines, newspapers, and TV ads just to function says something about what's going on inside them.

If you needed that little extra nudge to try out the Paleo way of eating, or if you're wondering if all the changes you've been making really are reflected by changes deep down in your body, look no further. If a body can heal from big injuries so much more easily on a Paleo diet, what is happening at the micro level? What is happening with cell damage on a daily basis? What about the immune system? There's a reason that Paleo folks can jump out of bed feeling rested and full of energy day after day. What you eat matters, so why not feed your body the way it was meant to be fed?

All's Well That Heals Well

My 3rd and final X-ray today showed my arm to be (finally) totally healed up! I have the green light to do anything that feels comfortable with it, and now I don't have to worry that if I crashed my bike or (heaven forbid) tripped again while running I would require surgery and pins, metal plates and all sorts of nastiness like that.

I've never split a bone like this before, I've only cracked them across the center. And I've never broken the bone at the joint either, so this is all new for me healing-wise.

The Report Card:

Running: 95%
You'd think a broken arm wouldn't affect running at all, but I was watching some video of myself running from today and guess what, my left arm swings out and away from my body instead of tracking straight backwards. It's not huge, but it's there, and it makes my torso twist more than it should when I run.

Biking:80%
I haven't really started climbing hills yet where I'll have to stand on the pedals and put a lot of stress on my arms and elbows but I can bike the flats to rolling hills with no problems now. Thinking of doing some flat time trials in May. Wheee!

Swimming: 70%
My arm straightens almost all the way out to a full glide, but I still can't keep my left elbow high to catch and pull much water, so my right arm starts to really fatigue about 2500 yards into my workouts as it's taking the lion's share of the workload.

Karate: 25%
I haven't done any contact at all since the accident, but that can start to change this week. Yeah!

Crossfit: 35%
I've had to substitute so many of the exercises in Crossfit, but I'm starting to work them back in with lighter weights now.

All in all, I'm on track to get myself all back in action. My doctor said that by 8- 10 months, I'll have all of the mobility back out of this arm that I'll ever have, so that's good incentive to listen to my physical therapist and be good about doing my exercises!

Nervous Nellie Rides Again

My bike and I are like two halves of a titanium/human fusion that were separated at birth. Normally, that is. Now we've been apart for two months while my arm recuperated, and just today we've been reunited again. The scene was set, the sun was out, the bike path beckoned... and I've lost my cycling nerve. I felt like a six-year-old whose mom had just let go of the back of the seat and has discovered they're now pedaling on their own. Every little thing on my two-wheeled journey appeared as a gigantic hazard, from little Fifi on her extendo-leash coming perilously close to my wheels to the bits of gravel on the path to the lady who scatters cracked corn for the ducks on her back porch, enticing them to a dangerous bike path crossing to the homeless people in the underpass who could at any moment swerve into my way. I wanted a jersey with foot-tall neon letters saying to all "STAY AWAY FROM ME". Whoa, talk about your Nervous Nellie. I am definitely afraid of tipping over, which makes me a far worse cyclist than when I didn't think about it much.

It has definitely reminded me of what it's like to be a newer cyclist, my tires haven't felt this teeny and skinny and barely-balanced in decades. I put my foot down at every stoplight, braked at every corner, and gave everything a wide berth. I know the comfort level will come back, and for today I was just more than grateful to be out there on the bike, especially with that almost-spring sunshine bearing down. The wetlands are full of birds right now and the bike path meanders through them with the sounds of meadowlarks, kingfishers, and red-wing blackbirds all around. So I got a great big happy smile on my face to go with my now sore back, neck, and quads!

So Close To Normal, Yet So Far For Swimming

I've never had physical therapy before, but after just one visit and doing the exercises this week my arm is feeling better than ever. For most things, it's very close to normal and I can even pick up a bag of groceries, open a door, or unscrew a jar.

For swimming of course, any deviation from normal is so darn noticeable. I think it really speaks to the importance of perfect form in swimming because really my arm is so close to being able to straighten that you wouldn't notice it in every day use. But in the pool, those slight milimeters of not-quite-straight make a HUGE difference in my swimming stroke. This tells you that if you're not getting your arms straight during the glide phase of your swimming stroke, you're doing yourself a huge disservice.

There are only two things my arm can't do quite correctly in the stroke. The first is be completely straight in front of me while gliding, and that alone cuts down on my speed when I stroke with the left arm. I can literally feel the glide go away with every other stroke. The second thing it can't do is to keep the high elbow on the catch and that makes a huge difference in the amount of propulsion that my left side can produce. These two things together point out in my mind the importance of good form, good flexibility, and keeping the elbow high in the catch.

As my arm gains flexibility, my speed is gradually coming back. Two weeks ago I couldn't break 1:30 for my average 100 pace. This last Saturday I hit 1:23 in my 300s, 1:21 in my 200s and 1:17 in the 100s. That's a huge difference in about ten days, and it's all due to flexibility and form, not any kind of conditioning. So if you're reading this with an eye to improving your swim times, you might think about doing some drills and working on straightening out your gliding arm, and keeping that elbow high on the catch! It might make a huge difference for you too.

Other than swimming, my bike riding is still probably the most impacted of all of my sports. Because of the way your weight rests on your elbows on aerobars, I can't ride my tri bike yet outside. I can do it on the trainer as long as I have a pillow under my bad arm. In karate, I'm still limited to doing kata (forms) and no contact, but at least I can still practice that regularly. All in all, everything is slowly coming back, and at six weeks after the break, I have a lot more range of motion and strength than I had hoped for.

The Plans, They Are A'Changing

It's so hard to step away from a dream once you start down the path to fulfilling it. The longer and the farther you go down that road, the more difficult it is to divert onto another. Yet I know from experience that just because you must take another path right now doesn't mean that you can't revisit your goals in the future. Sometimes it's better to postpone what you once thought was immediate and come back to it when the time is right.

That's the conclusion I've come to this week with my goal to test for my black belt in June. It's just not going to happen. My arm is actually healing up very nicely, but it's nowhere near the point where I can even straighten it without pain, let alone move it in a fast or aggressive manner. And if I even think about someone else touching it, I cringe. So I'm not going to be making it to any of the intense brown belt/black belt classes any time soon, not going to be doing any two-person contact at all, and I don't know how long it will be before I can even throw a proper punch or block.

Although it's probably been painfully obvious to others that this wasn't going to happen, I was stubbornly sticking to the plan for awhile. But now I know it will just have to wait. The upside is that by the time I do test I should be extremely well prepared. Also, my son is excited that perhaps we will test together, since he has a year to go until he would be ready. I don't know yet if it will take me that long or if I'll wait for him and test together or what.

On the plus side of things, I've been able to run now totally pain-free, and even did a semi-long run today of 8 miles without the arm hurting at all. I also swam on Saturday!!!! 1000 yards of swimming and 1000 yards of kicking. The swimming is ridiculous, I look like a wounded albatross flapping my way through the water, but I'm ecstatic that I can do it at all, and it doesn't hurt. I think it will help my arm rehab too, as long as I don't push it.

Little Things We Take For Granted

Opening Jars
Putting hair in a ponytail
Using a rolling pin
Buttoning jeans
Scratching an itch in the middle of your back
Wiping crumbs off a counter into your open palm
Opening a door when you're carrying something in your other hand
Shampooing your hair
Putting on a sweatshirt
Moving a heavy pot from one burner to the other
Two hands on the handlebars

It's almost harder to have my arm out of the cast. Hubby keeps saying things like "can't you just pick that up?" Um, no. It's still broken. It still doesn't work. It might not work for awhile. I have to tell myself this too so I don't do anything stupid and delay healing.

Healing Properties of Dog Slobber and Glowing Balls of Yellow Light

Castaway! No, not a movie starring Tom Hanks and a disturbing relationship with a piece of sports equipment... my cast is gone. Gone precious, gone! I have to admit, I was happy to get the thing in the first place, since every bump and movement was sending my arm into paroxysms of pain. But it quickly got old, especially in those dreaded moments when you have an itch underneath (coat hangers are your friend).

I got a new set of X-rays yesterday and everything is healing up amazingly well. I have pretty much no swelling at the site, the joint looks great, the tendons all look fine, and the bone is healing nicely. Best of all, the doc who took a look at it gave me the green light to move around as much as I feel able, just cautioning me to "let pain be your guide". That's always a sticky wicket with me, since my pain tolerance is freakishly high (I once famously told my midwife I was worried that I wouldn't know when I was in labor. She laughed. Until it came true.) Still, I figure as long as I proceed with good caution and don't do anything stupid, I'm going to be able to train, at least in a moderate fashion. That's WAY better news than I heard from Doc #1, whose mantra seemed to be "Wait 6 weeks" to do ANYTHING.

I don't know how much of what I did after the break influenced the healing, but here's my regimen for speedy bodily repair:

- Big doses of calcium and vitamin D (as per Doc #1)
- My old standby, Wobenzym, for soft tissue repair (this is the one supplement I use when training hard as well, just because it helps me be so much less sore after intense workouts)
- As much sleep as I can make myself get
- No NSAIDS (doc #2 says that now most docs believe they're contra-indicated in bone healing anyways)
- Lots and lots of dog kisses
- Positive visualizations in which I mentally send big glowing balls of healing energy light down my arm to the broken place and visualize my bone and tissues repairing themselves.

That's it, that's my magic formula. But speaking of dog kisses, here's something interesting. Since I've gotten my cast off, my dog Sophie has been coming up and licking my arm constantly. I wonder if dogs know that something is injured even if there's no outward sign. She doesn't lick my good arm, just the injured one. As you can see, just trying to get a photo of my cast she kept interrupting with more puppy kisses. She obviously believes I need more love in my life, what a sweetie!

Oh, So That's It!

I was talking to my Master's Swim coach and begging him to watch my stroke. Ever since I modified the "catch" part of my stroke, I knew it would take some time for my arm strength in that specific maneuver to catch up and let me swim efficiently again. But it hasn't seemed to be clicking and I've been slower than ever in the pool. It's been pretty discouraging to tell the truth, because I was hoping that this year I might just participate in a swim meet or two, something I haven't done since college. But I'm slow, slow, slow in the water and everything just feels wrong. I wanted him to take a look and see if he could tell me what was going awry.

Before I could even find a time to get in the pool with him though, he mentioned my ankle injury and asked me if I thought that was the problem. I didn't think so, but on Monday when I swam, I paid close attention to what was going on with my feet. As it turns out, my ankle flexibility on the right foot is almost nil, I'm getting almost nothing out of my kick on that side. Consequently, my arm stroke is all lopsided with propulsion coming with one of my kicks, but not the other. This makes my stroke surge and retreat, giving it a very choppy feel. Additionally, I'm only pushing off of the wall with one foot, completely favoring my other ankle, so I'm getting half the glide off of my turns that I normally do. No wonder I'm swimming so much slower per 100!

I'm so much happier now that I know what the trouble is. I've gotten used to my running being compromised by my ankle, and with over a month off I'm just easing back into that. But I hadn't realized how much it impacted my swimming. Now I know I just have to give it some time. But I wouldn't have realized any of this without my swim coach asking me to give it my attention. So now I just have to have a bit more patience for awhile, and I don't think I'll be sprinting a 100 at a swim meet any time soon!

Jumping In

Trying to find a time to go out for a run today was a bit like jumping rope. You know when your friends are twirling the rope and you're standing to the side, ready to go. You watch the rope go around once, twice, maybe you'll jump in, but it's not quite right. Finally you just have to go for it.

In the course of a few hours today we had sun, rain, fog, hail, drizzle, more sun, more hail... so finally I just jumped in with both feet and went out for a run. The toe is still holding steady, so I bumped up to 3 miles today (after a 2 miler last week), and so far it's still feeling okay. Then it was a couple of hours of raking leaves (remember my monster leaf pile!) and tonight I'll swim a few thou, and call it a day. The weather is supposed to be like this all week, so with any luck I may even get a bike ride or two in, if I jump at just the right time.

There's Pain, There's PAIN, and There's Absence of Pain

Now I know that you people out there in blogland are probably tired of reading about my Toe. You're probably saying to yourselves "It's a toe already, get over it!" To which I say you have no idea how important one toe is. Really. When you can't run (and you triathletes should understand that one!), can't swim much, can't bike on anything but a trainer, when you can't walk to the store, can't stand in the kitchen baking pancakes for your kids, well you start to realize just how important one toe can be.

Heck, you can't even have a little marital fun without The Toe becoming a problem. Think on this: you can't kneel, you can't lie on your stomach without hanging your foot off the edge of the bed. That limits things just a little. And then, if you manage to successfully block out the cattle-prod-like zings of pain that occasionally just randomly shoot through The Toe, and get into things a little bit, you come to a moment of toe-curling ecstasy and WHAM, The Toe sends you a pain message that causes you to catapult your partner across the room and clutch your foot in agony. Hardly conducive to happy marital relations.

But that's just regular old pain with a lowercase "p" that I've been living with since the Ironman. Yesterday in my karate class, I got to experience PAIN with all capital letters. We were trying a new sparring technique in which my partner was supposed to step past my right foot, except that she stepped right into it, clubbing The Toe with the side of her foot in full swing. Blammo, there was a Pain Explosion that almost knocked me out. Now, I'm no stranger to pain. For one thing, I've had two babies: 'nuff said. For another, I've broken numerous bones, had hundreds of stitches, and dislocated a few random limbs. Other than my twice-yearly trip to the dentist where he has to peel my fingertips out of his chair, I more or less laugh in the face of pain.

But this was like a pain bomb went off in my head, totally unbelievable. I instantly felt like I was going to both throw up and pass out at the same time. My sensei asked me if I was okay and I couldn't even talk. My friend Kay said that my entire mouth turned green, in the way that it does when people suffer a serious shock and are going to lose consciousness (and she, being a nurse, would know this). I valiently struggled to not barf in the dojo and eventually managed to say that I was okay. For about two hours after this incident, my foot hurt bad.

Then, to my utter amazement, it all went away. Totally and completely away. My foot doesn't hurt. The Toe has been demoted to just a toe again. I swam 4250 yards last night and kicked. Just before swimming, I told Kay in the locker room that I had two theories. One was that the Pain Explosion temporarily knocked out all of my pain receptors and I was just experiencing a brief reprieve from the sensations down there. The second theory was that, contrary to what my doctor thought after looking at the x-rays, my foot really was dislocated after all, and my karate partner managed to kick it back into place.

At this, Kay said one of her classic Kay lines: "I think we should always go with the theory that we like the best, even if it's not based on any reality at all." Except you've got to say it with her lovely south-ish of England accent and awesome laugh, which makes almost everything coming out of her mouth sound extremely witty. Seriously, she could read you a shopping list and you'd smile or outright bust up. So that's why I swam and actually kicked, hell and bad toes be damned. But the real kicker is that this morning it Still Feels Great!

So keep your fingers crossed that my second theory is it, and that this is the end of my Toe troubles for good. If not, well at least I'll enjoy my reprieve.

A Slap on the Wrist

Okay, so maybe running wasn't such a good idea after all. My foot hurts, and now my legs hurt too. Geez, ya'd think a gal who could run an Ironman without too much trauma could run one mile without her legs hurting like someone in a bad mob movie just got done hitting them with baseball bats or something. Maybe it's latent trauma re-surfacing or something, but I swear my legs feel worse than they did after the Ironman or my marathon last year! Maybe I ran on them funny in an effort to baby my injured toe, I don't know. I just know it's Not A Good Thing when you can't go down a flight of stairs without looking like your grandmother.

On the other hand, being as I now have to Sit Some More (otherwise known as resting and healing), I went to go see the new James Bond movie this week with my husband and son. I tell you what, looking at this sure took my mind off my hurt foot. I mean, look at those trapezius muscles, of course. Any swimmer would envy those, for sure. Yep. Seriously though, I give a double-thumbs-up to the new Blonde Bond. A much more physical Bond, one who definitely does not look silly or like a total wimp while throwing punches at the bad guys.