Day 2: Non-Consecutive 30 Day Challenge

I’ve been in conversation with my knee.

The day before I decided to take on this 30 day challenge, I hyperextended my knee.

It was very slight, but when I started drilling 30 flips every day, it wore my knee down. I babied it. I walked with a cane for three days. I didn’t declare my 30 day challenge, because I’d much rather have a working knee.

So I took a few days off. I stuck to qi gong and yoga, got my daily rhythm back, and waited until my knee said it was good enough to bounce.

Every couple of days I stepped back on the trampoline, testing it gingerly. The first time my knee gave me an encouraging performance, I tried a flip, and got a twinge in my lower back.

There is almost never a reason to risk a back injury. They suck.

So I took another couple days off, and when my body was ready, I drilled another 30 flips. It felt great.

For the last week, I’ve been doing 30 flips on days when the conditions are right. My body feels good, I’m stretched out, it’s sunny, and I feel up to the challenge of bouncing for twenty minutes and drilling a trick. I think I’ve done 4 of the last 7 days; it feels good not to push myself into a consecutive 30 day challenge. Not when injury is such an easy possibility, which is automatically the case when you’re upleveling your acrobatics with an aging body.

So instead I’m going to challenge myself to write about this 30 times on Medium. I’ll hit my 30 flips on 30 days, it just won’t happen within a month.

You’re welcome to tag along for the ride, if you want. Recently Medium launched this Letters function, which let’s you follow a collection, and get an email in your inbox when there’s a new entry. You can follow the 30 Flips in 30 Days collection here.

But if you just want to flip through this story when you see me around Medium, that’s cool. Leave a comment or recommend the story if it’s a chapter where I’ve hit something that resonates with you, so I can know which stories are the good ones.