I think I need to write about stuff I know.  No one seems to be putting all this stuff in one place for people.  I'm going to.  I'm going to write about my anecdotal experience of my fibromyalgia. 

For example, I was the one kid in my ballet class who could not do the splits.  Every other child in ballet at the age of five could do the splits.  I could not.  I tried.  I practiced constantly and I got a tiny bit closer, but basically, I could not do the splits. The other kids made fun of me and even the teacher did.  The presumption, of course, was that I wasn't practicing and that I wasn't working at it, even though from my point of view that's all I seemed like I was doing.

I also was the one child on the high school track and cross-country teams, who didn't seem to respond much to flexibility regimens designed to expand our flexibility.  While many teammates were able to lace their fingers together and drop them over the ends of the toes of their sneakers, I was the kid still straining down my shins to reach my doggone tootsies.

My body started showing a lot of the telltale signs of ligament/tendon failures that one expects with some of the EDS linkages that are starting to show up between fibromyalgia and Ehler-Danos Syndrome. I literally had to get taped for a year because my arches fell so severely that they took the ligaments and tendons down in the front and side of my legs had collapsed and had to be held up with tape to not be so much screaming agony for me.  I could barely walk, much less run.  The pain was excruciating. I loved running though and rather than give up, I was trying to adhere to the "no pain, no gain" adage to my detriment. 

Fortunately, the last straw for my body was athletically-induced viral meningitis, which finally knocked me down so hard, I had to stay down for a while.  When I got back up, I contracted mononucleosis and that took me down for an additional three months.  When I was finally able to run again six months later, most of the ligament and tendon inflammation was gone and I was running about a mile or two at a pop in Arizona on flats in college.

The problem is now, every time I work out, I tend to feel so good, I overdo and then get hurt again, making a return to working out difficult over and over again.  Now, with age, I'm hitting the usual burdens and hurdles of age and weight, of a deteriorating spine, which tosses other issues into the mix.  With Covid, I can't even swim because of all the high risk categories I fall into. It's pretty danged frustrating.

I'm trying to stretch mostly and bike when I can.