Caeleb MacDonald shares how hemophilia has shaped his approach to exercise, from understanding physical limits to finding ways to stay active through biking.
Transcript
With exercise and outdoor activities, things people with hemophilia have to face. I’d say for me it’s understanding the limit of of my body.
I have targeted joints through my right ankle and right knee. That has really limited my capabilities with, like, just the most bare minimum functions with my like where even walking can be very tricky. And I had to just understand what my limits were if I wanted to do any exercising and what I could, could work around with it.
For me, I’m a bit of a pacer. I love moving around, and it really helps get my brain moving. But because walking is pretty tricky, I learned that I actually quite like bike riding pretty early on, and whenever I feel I want to, like, essentially get my steps in, it’s more of me just biking around like my college campus as an example.
And that gets me active and gets me going. And it works a lot more on my upper legs than it does on the lower legs, which is where all my problems come from. So I am able to still go for a little while without having to worry too much about my issues with my leg.
For me, I always like set like these like pretty small goals of just, just, like, making sure I do something, even if it isn’t like a lot. Because even the smallest things, they, they they really do add up. And as for like fatigue and potential bleeds, it’s, it’s always just like understanding the boundaries that could come with those worries.
With of bike riding, it’s kind of tricky to go up inclines, but with with my leg and sometimes I over push myself to the point I was like super sore in my legs.
And I was wasn’t even sure if I was having a bleed or not. It was it was hurting that bad. And I was quick to, to understand that if there’s something something like that that shows up for me again, I can’t just tough it out and keep pushing.
I kind of need to know when when it’s a good time to take a break and walk the bike up instead or something like that. It’s very difficult at first, because we have a very different approach on how we have to treat our bodies. We, we ultimately have to be very gentle with ourselves.
So it’s kind of just understanding boundaries and what your limits are and how you can how you can kind of teeter the edge of getting to that limit, but not too much to, to where it’s just more painful to exercise than it ever does feel rewarding.
