"Growth Modeling"
Three ways I've tried to measure being "1% better every day" when that "1% better" tends to be nonobvious in ACL Recovery
Most days at my day job, I spend a disgusting amount of time in meetings. On the good days, I get to spend quality time making meaning from the numbers.
There’s something gratifying about a well-made Tableau dashboard that helps you measure the success of a recently-launched product. At my current role, I’ve become a huge fan of Fullstory for monitoring user sessions, witnessing their pain points in using the application, and seeing how certain new features are—or aren’t—performing against expectations or being utilized as expected.
To this day, I’m still more “poet” than “quant,” and I’m not the one you should call for configuring complex functions in Excel, but I’m fairly proficient at gleaning sharp insights from shapeless data. Before I was a product manager, I was a business case writer, which made me comfortable taking diverse and disparate sources of information—interviews, graphs, reports, news articles—and structuring a narrative out of the chaos.
Why bring up my day job in an ACL rehab mini-blog? Because my tendency to look for measurable progress is—as I mentioned in previous posts—practically compulsive and has the potential to be helpful here, so I’m going to lean into it.
So here’s a few ways I’ve—conventionally and unconventionally—tried to table, measure, and milestone out my recovery.
Method One: “The Milestone Calendar”
I was way more diligent about using this daily in my first few weeks post-op—nevertheless, something that I have used to analyze review how I’ve been doing is this low-tech, spreadsheet-based “Milestone Calendar.”
It serves as a rough, day-by-day accounting of progress that goes beyond the fundamental ACL recovery question of, “When was I able to achieve specific degrees of flexion or extension?” The goal of the calendar is to help me analyze the question of, “How, over time, was I progressing back toward normal living?”
While the color-coding isn’t perfect, as a general rule, I use yellow for “basic living milestones,” green for “big wins” and purple for anything exercise-oriented.1
Because you can’t take the product manager out of the patient, in true Agile Scrum retrospective style, there’s a “what went well” column (the highlights in Column I), and a “what didn’t go so well” column (the lowlights in Column J).
Method 2: '“The Dual-Ink Journal”
One piece of writing advice that I swear by is something picked up from the Tim Ferris podcast with Neil Gaiman is using different-colored pens for first drafts of your work to measure your progress. Instead of measuring writing in word count or time spent actively writing, Gaiman looks, day over day, at the volume written in different colors of ink:
If I’m doing anything long, if I’m working on a novel, for example, I will always have two fountain pens on the go, at least, with two different colored inks, at least, because that way I can see at a glance, how much work I did that day. I can just look down and go, “Look at that! Five pages in brown. How about that? Half a page in black. That was not a good day. Nine pages in blue, cool, what a great day.”
You can just get a sense of “Are you working?” “Are you making forward progress?” “What’s actually happening?”
In addition to this Substack, I keep a daily recovery diary where I keep the true, über-unfiltered “field notes” from the rehab journey. Using Gaiman’s methods, every day, I commit to writing down what I’ve been calling “the first draft” of the recovery story, using a new color of ink each day.
On most weekends, I have the luxury of spending uninterrupted time scrawling my soul into the Moleskine, but on most weekdays, I don’t have that kind of leisure before rushing off to PT or having the work day get in the way.
At minimum, I commit to sitting down to add one thought or one thing that stood out about my recovery from the day. It doesn’t have to be positive, long, eloquent, or useful (see the screenshot below). But it needs to be down there, raw and in ink, as a way having shown up to reflect on something important or noteworthy about what I did or what I felt on this road to recovery.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F64d86476-c878-41de-99b1-ca5944cfc148_3024x4032.jpeg)
Another thing from Gaiman that resonates in this process of journaling as the “first draft” of my recovery:
It emphasizes for me that nobody is ever meant to read your first draft. Your first draft can go way off the rails, your first draft can absolutely go up in flames, it can — you can change the age, gender, number of a character, you can bring somebody dead back to life. Nobody ever needs to know anything that happens in your first draft. It is you telling the story to yourself.
There will come a day where I will leverage the AI to expediently digitize my recovery diary so I’m not manually spending weeks transcribing my Moleskine. When I do, I will probably use ChatGPT to help me “word-cloud” the most commonly used words in my recovery diary for certain periods of time. As far as uses of AI go, I’m willing to feed the algorithm in order to answer the questions of how I processed my recovery, how I spoke about my body and my mood at given points in the journey, and how I felt about my overall trajectory “back to normal.”
Until then, I’m analog.
Method 3: “A Big Ass Book”
Last week, I wrote about comfort, and somewhere between the end of rewatching The O.C and beginning a rewatch of Gossip Girl, I decided that I didn’t want to look back on my recovery and measure it strictly seasons of teenage soap operas watched.
I wanted to be able to say I did at least one unequivocally edifying thing over the course of my rehab, and decided:
I could measure my recovery proudly in having digested one major, world-class work of fiction that I’ve never read before.
I am going to read a big ass book.
After waffling between East of Eden, The Tale of Genji, One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Brothers Karamazov, and The Iliad—all works that have been on my list for some time—I settled on one that seemed most appropriate: Don Quixote.
I had read pieces of Don Quixote in high school for the AP Spanish Literature exam, but never read the thing cover to cover. The more I thought about it, the more it made sense to read alongside my ACL recovery story. Not unlike one’s post-op exploits, Don Quixote is a story about imagination, adventure, delusion, vitality and relentless optimism.
Quick overview of the premise: Quixote is a man in his fifties who becomes so possessed by medieval works of literature about chivalry and knights’ escapades that he becomes insane. At the drop of a hat—or rather, an iron helmet—he decides to quit his life and become a knight’s errant, traveling across Spain in search of wrongs to right, damsels to save, and whatever else befits his role as a noble servant of justice.
He bumbles along. He gets ridiculed—usually with good reason. His efforts to help sometimes go horribly wrong and cause more harm to the victims he had intended to save. But he is undeterred in visualizing the world of his dreams, and consistently makes his imagination a reality.
In the course of a recovery, that is a critical thing: to be able to envision your darkest moments more brightly, to see your circumstances the way that Quixote sees his own: as something better, more magical, and more inspiring than others would ever believe them to be.2
I’ll add that I fully intend to keep “comfort TV” in rotation: it’s the only way I can endure sitting on a stationary bike and grinding through the requisite discomfort for regaining my range of motion. At the same time, I look forward to looking back on this process and being able to say, “in addition to numbing out with a lot of bubbly, nostalgic television, I also—finally—read one of the most important works of literature ever written.”
The book is huge, but reading one chapter of Quixote every day is realistic for me. By the time I finish the book, I hope that I am able to:
Climb and descend stairs confidently
Walk without a limp and without looking solicitously at my feet with every step
Go out in public without anxiety related to my ability to move proficiently
In other words: by the time I’m done reading about Quixote traversing La Mancha, I should be able to traverse Marietta.
Thanks for Reading!
If you have any other tips or suggestions for how to document and track recovery in unexpected ways, I’m all ears. Drop a note in the comments or send me a message with your latest and greatest ideas.
The only kind of feedback I am not looking for (in the near term) when it comes to progress tracking: things that rely on Apple Health, Strava, or other health-tech apps. I’m still a little salty about this unsolicited, albeit data-driven feedback about the state of my ability to walk:
See you next week,
EZ
You don’t see it in this view, but for hard setbacks, I use red to indicate a major lowlight in recovery. Those don’t show up until Weeks 4+ in earnest, and are largely tied to failing to execute specific exercises or subpar progress reports in PT/medical follow ups.
Hence the word derived from the book: quixotic