High School Hormones

Obviously I hurt my knee again after the team workout. Of course, right? I am so mad at myself for not just giving up and skipping the damn training session, as I really would have liked to do. There are times when I like my go-get-‘em attitude and sometimes it gets me in so much trouble! In researching the “IT Band” some more, to find out what the heck I need to do in order to be able to run this marathon in a month, it all became clear why I hurt myself in the first place—or the second place, if you are counting the actual first time I hurt it a month ago. PS. Why did it get better only to fool me and get worse again? Well, there could actually be several reasons for this IT pain, but the one I believe is that the IT band pain comes from super tight leg muscles, especially the gluteals (ass) that then get overworked and drag the IT across the knee joint and femur creating this friction aka misery pain. In my case, the crazy-intense team workout followed by three days of muscle soreness and an immediate attempt at a 15 mile run wasn’t the best of ideas. But my knee didn’t hurt at the time! Of course I wouldn’t have even tried if I thought it wasn’t magically better. So anyway, back to square one on the resting, icing, and stretching. So utterly boring.

Here’s what is anything but boring: chaperoning a high school girls’ lacrosse trip to Florida. Maybe tedious at times, maybe hot and sunburny at times, but never boring. Especially when boys’ baseball teams start showing up at the hotel. Somehow, the girls didn’t get in trouble until the last night of the trip. Ever so smartly, they were loudly commingling right outside our balcony—of all the places on the property, I mean really. We heard a boy yell one of our girls’ names across the entire hotel; we saw some of them walking off on the beach with boys we had never seen before; we saw them exchanging phone numbers; we heard them conspiring to go back out to meet the boys after they had checked in with us. For kids who are supposedly so smart, they sure can make some surprisingly inane choices. And of course, even though we saw and heard all of the above with our own eyes and ears, the group blames it all on the one girl we actually called out because we saw her going off alone with a boy. I sure don’t care if you gals hang out with some boys but golly can you not creep alone down a dark alley with someone you don’t know? The number one rule was “stick together”, so of course we had to bust her. I guess that’s not too bad for six nights though.

Anyway, it was too hot to run in Florida (even though I saw, several times, people of various shapes and sizes running around lunchtime of all hours—near the highway of all places) so I took the week off. This does not bode well for the “training” I am supposed to be doing, but maybe will help with my annoying perpetual injury. The girls did get a lot better at lacrosse though. And I have a nice tan, naturally.