And I'm feeeeeelin' ... good?

Strangely, yes. After several days feeling like someone had beat me up in the parking lot, I woke up this morning feeling almost quite normal. I did my usual routine of sleep for 5 hours and wake up, but I think that was more from habit than pain, and I fell back to sleep.

This morning my hips barely hurt, my back doesn't hurt, and my knees don't hurt. It's amazing. AND, I skated for 45 minutes yesterday, working on Novice Moves since Tim is out of town. I skated at medium intensity and so I figured I'd pay for it today, but somehow I'm not.

The past 3 nights I've had trouble sleeping and it has felt as if someone kicked me in the pelvis by morning. My back has hurt almost as much as my hips but I think that is from standing at my desk all day vs. sitting. And my knees have started to bother me, probably because I walk funny and that puts additional stress on them.

I think that I can attribute this episode of feeling good to stretching last night. I didn't stretch overly hard or long, but I did it. I hate stretching and always have. It has always been painful and I've seen very little progress with it. I've always been inflexible even when I've worked hard at it. This has caused me to hate ballet class where they keep telling me to do things I can't, and to hate stretch class and yoga class where I am the only one who can't touch my toes or bring my knees to my chest.

I even hired a personal trainer once to work on stretching with me. She said I was "the least flexible young person" she had ever seen. Stretching for me has always been a losing battle. Now in middle age I'm only going to get less flexible, so while stretching won't improve me, it may keep me feeling better than I would without it. So I need to make time for it even though it hurts and I hate it.

Other things that I'm learning about myself:

I have very overdeveloped glutes. This is called a "skater's butt," but I have more than the usual amount of it. I have the mega butt, which contrasts enough with my very small waist that I can't find clothes to fit. I always thought the butt was due to skating, even though it persisted during those two decades when I wasn't skating (although I was doing other athletic activities). I wondered why I got so much of it even though as a kid I really wasn't training heavily compared to many and I wasn't an elite skater. I had no body fat either back then so it was just very, very strange and oh, so ugly.

Now I think it's the mechanism my body has used to compensate for the weakness in my hips. I think the muscles around the hip joints have atrophied and the glutes always made up the work load. This is also why I found that I was very weak doing certain exercises that everyone else found easy. I just didn't have the structure for it and the muscles couldn't get strong no matter what. The biggest muscles in my lower body picked up the slack for all the rest.

This is all amateur science and conjecture on my part, but would certainly make sense if it were true. I can't find anything in the medical literature stating that people with acetabular dysplasia develop large glutes, but perhaps it depends on which athletic activities they pursue. My body has been trying to do the things I ask of it, skating-wise, with a structure that is more suited to couch potato-hood, and since I insisted, it compensated.

Well, all this aside, today I am feeling good so I plan to take advantage and paint the closet in the bathroom.