I've been taking a few weeks holiday from the tech scene and blogging, partly to devote some more time to rehab'ing from my broken leg of now six months ago. I've been able to discard in succession the walker, the crutches and cane. However, I'm still walking with a noticeable limp due to limited range of motion in the relevant ankle joint, which got all sorts of crud dumped into it as a result of soft tissue damage from the break, and the ensuing surgery. This is slowly improving with a routine of physical therapy sessions and exercises that alternate between painful and boring.
What you don't realize until it happens to you - particularly if you're of the 50+ set - is just how debilitating being stuck on your behind for 4-5 months really is. I'm once again out and hiking, but the two miles with a few hundred feet of climbing that I did yesterday felt like eight and a couple thousand feet would have before. At least the the obvious connection between damage and activity - and immediate pain feedback - means that I've been easing back onto the trails deliberately. It's easy to forget that when restarting other activities. A couple weekends ago I went back to the shooting range, to see just how far my skills had eroded due to the time off. Not too badly, fortunately, but having fun and doing well caused me to ignore warning signs produced by the rather contorted back positions sometimes assumed while target shooting. Not a good idea, since I then spent most of a week down with lower back pains. Lesson: It's not just the limb and muscles that were injured - everything is weaker and stiffer, and you have to restart carefully.
There's at least one pleasant surprise. I'd assumed the same period stuck indoors would leave me a pasty Joe White-boy. Fortunately, 20+ years in the California sun has built enough of a base tan that it's not been a problem, given a little discretion. Yup, I know that'll mean an occasional skin cancer screening in the future, but you pays your money and you takes your chances.
