The Katmah Experience

It’s been a while. I’ve been busy taping teenagers together, writing midterms and reviews, tutoring, managing the political side of student life, and starting personal research projects and (wait for it) relaxing on weekends (sometimes).

First things first, we’ve made it to the end of regular season football. The last three weeks brought some pretty busy games for me. In one game I used all of our splints. The game before that my injury report when on for pages. There was actually a brief period where I thought I wasn’t going to have a team left to work with by this point in the season. However, being the underdogs that we are, we’re surviving and are facing our last regular season game tomorrow before heading into playoffs. I had one week where I had no injuries, which was a very odd break when my entire season has been next to non-stop. This one week was short lived as I started this week with a neck injury and my first ambulance call. The kid is perfectly fine, and the ambulance call was more of a “better safe then sorry” call, but it was a interesting experience nonetheless. Thankfully my first responder skills are still very much intact, and I was able to stay cool and collected through the whole process. While my kids are taking a beating, I’m lucky to be able to get lots and lots of experience! Once football is over I will begin with a new hockey team (high school varsity). Hockey will be a new sport to add to my list, as I have next to no experience in it (what kind of Winnipegger am I?!). I am excited for the challenge, and looking forward to the new experiences.

I’ve been spending at least one morning a week in the clinic, as well, to keep those skills somewhat fresh. Every week my confidence and independence grows, and I’m very lucky to have great supervisors and mentors throughout all my experiences. I’m so blessed with close classmates and peers to re-hash details of assessments with, and even just to laugh about the joys of working with teenage athletes. They really do do and say the most priceless things.

Midterms are basically over, finally. This week holds one major presentation but no exams. The exams themselves have been fairly spread out (about one per week), but mixed in is an endless stream of papers, reviews, and reports due. This year has been quite different as there is less straight up examination of knowledge, and more detailed application and review of topics. I’m loving the increase in independence, application of knowledge, and getting to chose topics to discuss that are interesting and relevant to my goals.. but it certainly is more time consuming then just studying the facts. KSA presidential work has kept me busy, and usually just when I think I have everything under control. So far I’ve found myself writing letters to deans, university officials, and students to bid for better student space and office space for execs (our current space is awful), this week brings our sister association WATSA’s annual massage-a-thon with which I am also involved, and in a couple weeks the University will be hosting Thrive week (a health awareness week) in which KSA will be heavily involved for organizing some on campus sporting events for all students, and handing out general health information (nutrition and physical activity). I have extremely helpful execs and co-presidents who make it much easier to get things accomplished! Now that midterms are quieting down, hopefully things start running a bit less hectically.

I’ve been doing my best to give myself at least one day for me a week. I get so busy during the rest of the week that I don’t even have time to be stressed about being busy. Lately some of my time has been eaten up as my basketball team’s season is kicking into gear, and this weekend I decided running in the Fire Paramedic 10k was a good idea (even though I haven’t ran in months.. feeling that one!)…Weekends for the most part have remained my own, and I am very grateful to have time to spend with my loved ones. Quite often I make it out to the country with J and go for a little ride on Felix or just enjoy being out of the city.

A couple weeks ago, just to really test my limits, I launched a little bit of personal research. This will be an on going project, and have had a good response already. Basically I am looking for riders (either competitive, or not) who have been dealing with chronic pain either from a previous injury or just in general. I’m interested in finding out what I can change about their pain after an 8week exercise therapy program focused on postural and biomechanical corrections in their daily life and in the saddle. Each case will be different and unique, and I’m looking forward to seeing what I can learn and how I can improve some local rider’s function at the same time! I’ll be sure to post interesting progressions up here for interested readers!