Originally Posted by
yankeefan
I'm ... 22
... only to break my leg a less than a month later while skateboarding. I'm 3 weeks into a 6-8 weeks recovery and lying in bed all day, not being outdoors and doing what I love is absolutely driving me crazy. I've gained a lot of weight due to emotional/boredom eating and I can't stop thinking about how much my fitness is deteriorating given how much work I did during last winter/spring dropping a lot of pounds and "base training" dreaming of finally doing a century during the summer.
1) You are
very young. A month from now you'll be back into cycling. 6 months from now this will be a distant memory.
2) You broke a leg. You didn't break your arms too, did you? Why aren't you doing upper body and core work?
3) Stop eating so much.
4) Get busy doing something else. Learn how to play the guitar, read, design software, write a book ...
This is where your youngness is showing through. Those of us who are older have a list a mile long of things we would like to do if we only had time to do them. But we're too busy rushing around and doing everything else, and sometimes it takes an injury or illness to slow us down enough to do those thing we would like to do if we only had time to do them.
Back in 2001, after a great first season of randonneuring, I burnt my left foot to the bone. I could not move for 5 weeks. Standing up caused the blood to pool in that foot because the artery/vein system was cooked, and was agonisingly painful. Even doing upper body weights increased my blood flow a bit and caused blood to pool painfully in that foot. So for 5 weeks I laid in bed until I absolutely had to get up ... then I'd hobble out to my chair in the living room and elevate that foot. There I would stay until I returned to bed in the evening.
Now for me, eating too much wasn't an issue. I couldn't stand up long enough to make myself anything to eat. My homecare nurse would come once a day to change my dressings, and she would bring me something small from the kitchen. And I would have visitors once in a while who would bring me something to eat. I didn't gain any weight.
One of the main things I did was work. My boss brought me work on CDs.
5 weeks later I was back at work again. 3.5 months after the accident I was back on a bicycle again, still with a bandaged foot. Burns take a long, long time to heal. And 5 months after the accident I was riding my first 200K randonnee of the season. I had one of my best seasons that year.