“I don’t get injured.”
That’s what I tell myself, anyway. I do have a long record of never missing a race due to injury. And I really have a hard time thinking of any period in my life when I could NOT do some form of exercise because a specific body part was non-functional. As opposed to taking a day off now and then simply from exhaustion.
On the other hand, there has almost never been a day when I have not felt some nagging little tweak or ache or dysfunction somewhere in my system. I’m convinced I am in a constant state of repair, and that some of those repair jobs are significant enough to rise to the level of my consciousness.
My family, to say nothing of friends and training partners, really don’t want to hear anything about it; I suppose it’s like listening to your boring uncle talk about his digestive disorders. The one exception is my sister, Leigh. We have a six decade history of sharing a fascination with each others’ bruises, bumps, and lacerations. Probably born in the labile period of 2-4 year olds’ exploration of just how their bodies worked, we have always traded stories of What’s Not Working Right This Week.
I remember when my age was still in single digits being given a tour, by my mother, of the “scars” on my sister’s face. Each and every little white line came from some accident or other, seemed to make her special, and made me long for such an adventurous life, capable of leaving a breadcrumb trail behind to show just how bold she’d been. I think my mother was hoping for the opposite effect, though.
Then, in our early teens, we took up figure skating. Multiple falls produced the occasional limb laceration, from thin, obsessively sharpened blades flying rudely about. A few years later, we were skiing, and a whole new world of shiners, ankle sprains, and muscle pulls abounded. The acme was reached in my early thirties, when a combination of “modern” ski pole grips and a propensity to fall on my hands resulted in bilateral “gamekeepers’ thumbs”. I actually thought I would have to give up skiing in order to save my career as a surgeon, but was saved by the discovery of pliable cast molding material, from which I crafted a brace to hold my hand in a permanent and indestructible ski pole grip.
Cycling brought road rash and whatever the equivalent is in mountain biking; Leigh brought a variant to the table when she took up roller blading.
Maturity has seen an increase in the size of our fingers, the breakdown of small joints in our hands, and bunions for both of us. Comparing surgical scars and recovery rates has filled our conversations for several years now.
But, amazingly, neither of us has ever broken a bone, or damaged a leg joint, or ripped a muscle to shreds, or done anything to really stop our intrepid drive to keep having fun with our athletic abilities.
Nonetheless, here’s is the current crop of niggling issues I have today. Each of these is like all the others I’ve ever had. It gives me pause, and makes me worry that this one, this injury, will be the one that will put me out of commission for en extended time. I fear I won’t be able to train properly, that I will have to miss too many days of workouts to successfully engage in whatever artificial endurance contest I have planned next.
Let’s see, I have three body worries now. The first has been around almost a year. My left shoulder, probably one of the small rotator cuff muscles, hurts when I swim, and aches at times when I don’t. The good news is, this has been less and less of a problem over the past months or so. I don’t think it’s actually getting better. I convinced myself that the pain represented a breakdown in technique, some motion I was making which was either inefficient or inappropriate. So I tried all sorts of things to alter my stroke – different breathing patterns, change in rotation of my body, angle of my arm as I pulled through the water. All that, plus the sheer act of swimming MORE, have seemed to keep this under control. But it is always there, always ready to feel a little fatigued when I sit at my desk or shout out in pain when I move my arm wrong while swimming. It’s been with me so long now, I think it is really the first example of chronic breakdown, from simply too many years of doing the same thing over and over (50 years now) at too high an intensity, like a runner whose knees just start to give out.
All injuries, of course, produce a fear that some major damage has been done. What I worry about it is the dreaded “tear” of my rotator cuff, which classically takes so long to heal. Or maybe a little bone spur getting in the way of the free movement of the muscle tendon in its groove while my arm goes through its repetitive windmills swimming freestyle. SOmething which might require surgery and thus protracted, enforced downtime.
Next is my back. Here the problem is sitting. When I sit in a car to long, or at a desk, writing, or on a couch, watching TV, or whatever, my lower right back, in the area lateral to the lumbar-sacral region. Just gets tight, and sore. Thankfully, it is no way inhibits swimming, biking, running, or skiing. Again, I think maybe too many years of flip turns have played a role here. And I fear that a bulging disk (or worse, a tumor) is the real culprit. Maybe I should get an MRI?
Finally, may I present my right calf. Last Sunday, I raced the Tacoma City Half-Marathon. I’ve done this twice before, winning my age group each time. This year, a real runner showed up, and I got second, but at least beat my time from last year by 30 seconds. BUT, I must have been either undertrained, or I over worked, as my calves felt completely shut down for more than two days afterwards. I actually skipped a run workout on Tuesday, and feared that I would lose fitness forever as a result (typical triathlete thinking). The gastrocnemius tendon, just at the base of the bulging calf muscle, is what hurts. My calf feels a little swollen and sore, and I worry that continued running may lead to a dreaded outcome – ruptured achilles tendon. SUrgery and 9-12 months out of commission, probably never to come back.
But, as with all my “injuries”, I am finding that continued, judicious use is actually the best cure. I’m going to go out for a two hour run this morning, after a set of 3, 1 mile intervals yesterday morning. If I didn’t have my injuries to worry me, how would I ever know I was really working hard enough?