Wren Ward

This week was largely uneventful, stretches most mornings without exercises or incident. Sunday was an early start with a late night so I skipped it. There weren't many energy sinks in the week either, I found I didn't get the job I interviewed for the previous week and decided to look at other, more freelance, ways to make a living. I've set myself up with a bit of a productivity schedule for the day and have been using it to submit flash fiction to literary journals and see if I can make something of myself in that space.

Hopefully it will motivate me to write these posts actually weekly so I can stay on time with the postings. There's currently a 7 week delay on publishing each exercise diary post so I have a buffer, best not to need it. This schedule is designed to help me manage my fatigue as well. If I'm writing at my own pace, I can work from bed, sleep through the day or write when I can't sleep. Maybe I'm too optimistic but I have to try.

With the various lurgies dying down and the underlying health conditions largely behaving themselves, it's back to business with the morning stretches. I'm leaving out the core work and the planned back and shoulder work for this week as I think easing back into it is better than burning all the way out. My cats have decided that the calf stretching is prime time for trip hazards. They've never winded around my legs as much as when I'm staring at a wall trying to get a stretch out of it.

This week's energy expenditure has been really weird. The interview on Monday was a full work day, no lunch, of scenarios and interviews. All social interactions and heavy thinking. It was a great experience and I didn't have a huge energy crash after like I expected, the next day I was still hyped up from it. I spent a lot of time writing for most of the rest of the week, nipped out for a crafts club meeting on Friday evening and generally felt good about it.

Sunday was a hard day, I skipped the workout in the morning as I was going all day and needed the extra sleep to make it through. A lot of emotion at the Quaker Meeting in the morning was hard to manage, followed by reviewing my Grandma's possessions her house gets sold to pay for the care home she's recently moved into. I got home late having been out all day, drank 2L of coke ate the biggest chocolate bar I could find and absolutely crashed out.

Another week of no exercises or stretches. The tail end of the con crud followed by the post-crud fatigue made me still quite shaky so instead of making myself worse, I took this extra week to adjust to not being exhausted again. I did travel 2 hours by bus to help my Mum build and adjust her new dressmaking body form. I did, unfortunately, overdo it so spent the rest of the week trying to be a human and ending up asleep wherever I set myself, waking up frustrated and then falling asleep again.

Which isn't ideal, as I have an interview on Monday and bunch of pre-work and research to do.

This week was a no go. While last weeks allergy attack finished, my period and an echo of the con crud had me completely unable to function. So doing the stretches and muscle building activities were making me shake and feel dizzy and I decided that probably wasn't the move.

Returning from ConTingency I was braced for Con Flu aka Con Crud aka Fresher's flu for grown-ups, I was not braced for nipping into a yarn shop and getting dust mited so badly it takes me a full week to get over it. The first few days I managed to get the exercises done, not always when first got up, but when I had the energy to do it. That petered off as I got less and less sleep due to mucus and sneezing.

Then, towards the end of the week, my period started. The ridiculously oversized allergic reaction should have been a warning it was coming, but there we are. I tried to do the exercises during the period but i felt so weak I couldn't hold the stretches without my muscles shaking. So I'm buckling down and waiting it out.

This week was a week largely away from home. he first couple of days were rest days where the only activity I really did was the morning exercises and prepare myself to go away for a few days. The planks had to stop as my wrists were really suffering for it. I increased the duration of a couple of the physio positions and the reps of the core exercises. I didn't want to make too many changes as I was about to roll up my floor mat and take it with my to Sunny (look, I'm British, it's February, we lie to ourselves constantly) Hunstanton.

My partner and I met up with his best mate to go to a TTRPG convention called ConTingency in a caravan holiday park in Hunstanton. We stayed in a nice minimal cabin Each day I attended at least 2 4 hour games, both in the afternoon to allow myself to wake up and do some exercises before getting stuck in to some good old fashioned nerdiness.

Taking the time in the morning to wake up properly and do those exercises really worked hard to combat the gaming shrimp pose as well as the leg stress of not being able to touch the floor with my feet (the chairs are normal size, more than half the population[1] can't touch the floor properly in a chair and it screws all of us up in the joints and muscles). I'm thinking of bringing a footstool with me to next year's event to reduce the amount of hip pain those chairs were giving me. If I'm really lucky, I could make a few and sell them.

The only time I got up for the 9am slot it was because the GM was great and I didn't want to miss out on playing at that table. I took the time, though, to do my exercises as that was the a 3 game day for me, starting 9am and finishing at 11pm with quick breaks for lunch and dinner. It was absolutely worth getting up that 30 minutes earlier than otherwise as it would have been easy to skip it but I would have been hobbling by the end of it.

[1] the average chair is designed for a 6 foot tall person, if you will excuse the biological categorisation for the sake of statistics, most grown women and quite a few grown men are under this height. Plus, consider how many of the population are still children, we're well over half the population.

This is written 2 weeks later so things are a bit hazy. As on the previous week I increased my activity slightly each day but unlike the previous weeks, this week had a few things on that involved leaving the house and using energy that I rarely have but, over the last couple of weeks, I've gained a bit of confidence in my energy. Possibly unwisely.

The main change in the morning workout was changing the order of the big muscle stretches so that the calf stretch came first, this made all the others much less uncomfortable. I also added a little bit of a plank. My wrists and arms seem to struggle the most with it most, which isn't particularly surprising as that's where the injury I got in 2019 mostly manifests. I need to find a way to get good stretches in my forearms without also screwing over my nerves or tendons. No. Nerve flossing isn't the answer.

Anyway, throughout the week I worked on helping my mate who is having a bastard of a time getting her final university papers written, focus, stay calm and stay on task as she thunders head first through 2 of the 3 remaining papers. Unfortunately, this involves staying up late and maintaining a centered, calm and focused internal state. Something I was great at before COVID and am only better than average at now. It was hard work to maintain it for so long.

Tuesday contained a 1 hour training meeting for a interview I have in February in which a great deal of information was given very quickly. For some reason, that is very hard to describe beyond "I thought I could do it" I did some reading on a theoretical Mathematics book I've borrowed from the library. Work in the 1950s on modelling networks of neurons in the human brain was wild and it seemed somewhat... simplistic. But that's how the earlier models always look, simplify to see if you can model anything at all then add complexity a level at a time.

To give myself a break from all this thinking (something I never felt I needed before COVID) I have been Cleaning and Tidying the house. I'm now on top of washing clothes, towels and bedding as well as the pots and surfaces in the kitchen. I know that doesn't sound very exciting and, as the unemployed one in the house, like something I should already be doing, but anyone with chronic fatigue knows when getting out of bed is an achievement, a clean kitchen is a distant dream. The absolute madness for me was that I even felt energetic enough to dig through the jumpers and blankets chest (with a mask on, the dust mites are a menace) and clean everything.

Also this week I went to the dentist, sold my car and had a haircut, all of which involved not only being outside but also holding conversations and trying to convince people that I'm a normal, functional human being. My therapist calls it masking, I call it avoiding misunderstandings.

Towards the weekend my energy crashed, I was barely human at the hairdressers and couldn't even get to the Quaker Meeting on Sunday as my partner was using the only household car.

I managed to maintain my exercises in the mornings and I do think it helped me make it manageable. Don't worry, I've done even more foolishly energy consuming things in week 4!

This week was an interesting one. I've added a little bit of shoulder/back movement in with the help of some resistance bands I've been having pain in two places in my back, the first is in a usual place, my lower back, I usually slump there and have fairly weak lumbar muscles. That makes a certain amount of sense as I've been walking around a lot more and not sitting or laying in a supported position. The one that surprised me the most is the mid-back pain on the left side below the point of my shoulder blade. Again, I know my posture sucks but this is an interesting new pain. It feels like the build up of pressure that I get with my joints that is relieved when something goes click. I'll talk with my physio/massage therapist about it the next time I see her, she might note something I'm going wrong in the movements or have something better I can do instead.

Aside from the pains, my energy has continued to grow, I was able to go out with a friend and sit in a too-high chair for a few hours and get home at midnight without too much hassle. The next day I was more tired than I have been since I started the exercises but not absolute dead as I might have felt previously. Frankly, prior to last week, I don't think I could have been out that long and safely driven home.

On Sunday I got up earlier than my body was telling me I should and had to skip the morning exercises because I couldn't get out of bed the 30 minutes earlier it would have required. I was exhausted that day, a combination of getting up early, skipping the exercises and maybe still a little bit of a recovery tiredness from the event two days before. I had to have a nap and rearrange a buddy-system writing appointment I had. Typing this on Monday, however, I'm feeling fine. Not as hyper as I have been in week 2 but still much more energetic and grounded than I have been.

Getting to sleep has been an issue. I've always had trouble with sleep (getting to sleep, keep waking up in the night, can't get back to sleep again, waking up early) so that shouldn't be too surprising but with the fatigue I was feeling before, getting over 12 hours sleep was normal for me and I was collapsing into bed, exhausted, at the end of the day. I don't really know what to do about it except maybe try to wear myself out. We have a walking machine so perhaps I should try that. Part of the issue is that my brain is awake and firing all kinds of ideas at me. I've been reading a lot of interesting research papers and articles at the moment so I might need to move that activity earlier in the day so I can reduce the mental stimulation closer to bed time.

The goal of all of this is to get me back into a state where I can wake up naturally and completely at 6am and be ready for bed at 10-11pm. This was closer to the manner in which I slept when I was at my peak gym activity and it allowed me to prepare things before work and still have some time after for harder exercise, chores or just some good old fashioned doom scrolling. I'm not in work at the moment due to my unpredictable and fatigue-riddled health so it would be nice to get to a place where I could feasibly work again, or at least not feel like I never see the sunlight (UK winters are rough for that).

At the moment I'm stretching the big muscles in my legs and bum and trying some core activation physio exercises I was given a long time ago. The stretch in my quads has had the most surprising impact. When I started week 1, I needed to use a foam roller under my bum to kneel on my shins and get that stretch. On Tuesday of week 2, I could do it without the foam roller and with my bum touching my heels. It's still a sensitive stretch but the progress is really heartening. Towards the middle of the week, the actual limit on that stretch was discomfort in my calves which, admittedly I had been neglecting somewhat. So with a bit more attention to freeing up my calves before doing it, I'm slowly getting down to be able to sit on my shins. I hope this means I'll soon be able to progress to a more traditional stretch, standing on one leg and holding the ankle. I've actually never been able to do that before.

I do want to take a moment to appreciate my cats hanging out with me in stretching in the mornings. It reminds me of the pictures of Muslim people praying and their cats either joining in on the prayer mat or chilling on their own mini mat. I wonder if I should source mini yoga mats for the cats to join in. Mostly they just watch me from a comfortable, elevated surface and try to swat at the little knitting bean in the Focus Friend app I use to time myself. I wonder how long it will take them to try to mimic me or if there needs to be more than one human doing activities for them to join in.

Well that's, annoying.

After several months of telling myself I'll wait until my fatigue lets me wake up naturally before noon to start doing exercise in the morning, I broke. My partner set up a mat, bench and some small dumbbells up in our spare room and it was exactly the right space for me to do some morning physio and I couldn't resist. Starting Monday and going daily for 7 days, I am now, on day 8 (having done today's workout already and just about finished breakfast), bright eyed and bushy tailed, writing a blog post at 11:45am. I woke up at 10:30.

I used to be a lot more active, I would lift weights 3 times a week, do tai chi once a week, attend a HIIT class twice a week as well as physio three times per day, every day. What on earth was I doing all that for? I have a connective tissue disorder so getting my muscles in proper shape to hold me together without getting too tired or too cramped is vital. The risk of not doing those things is pain, fatigue and injury.

In April 2019 I took part in a powerlifting competition and my hands cramped up. They didn't uncramp for 9 months and by then I had lost a lot of my motor skills in my hands. I was depressed, I was unable to work out, I was exhausted and in pain. Towards the end of February 2020 I started working with a medical professional who had a plan to get me back to lifting and out of the hole. In the first week of March 2020, we went to the gym to start the plan. In the second week of March 2020, the world shut down and I had to work 12 to 15 hours a day in my "essential" analytics job.

2 years later, I got a new job, it turns out if a large corporation can find a way to get you to work extra for no money, they'll keep applying that squeeze until you die. My income doubled. My partner and I went on holiday together. We got COVID. I got Long COVID.

So now my fatigue is not just related to the conditioning in my muscles. I lost my job. I've spent 7 months desperately trying to rest enough to recover, eat enough and correctly, speak to people enough that I don't go out of my mind, and generally recover to the point that my partner doesn't worry himself to death about me. I had a chest infection over Christmas.

So you can understand why I wanted to wait until I was waking up a bit earlier. I couldn't stand the idea of waking up, doing the easiest workout and then having to go straight back to laying down. Thankfully the opposite has happened.

This week I have not only had the energy to stay out of bed, but enough to do small tasks around the house. With plenty of breaks and lots of listening to my body, the whole downstairs is now tidy, flat surfaces (dangerous places where small things get set down and forgotten) have been mostly cleared, posts have been washed and Christmas things, which are usually hanging about until we see baby birds in the garden, have been put away. Today I'm starting to look at the upstairs, which isn't as untidy as the downstairs but has developed a small home gym and there are boxes.

And to think, a few stretches, a few core activation exercises and a bit of the Alexander Technique and I'm sitting up, tidying up, and thinking about what I want to do this year.

I think I'll do some writing.