Rest And Recover

“How long have you had this?” says my health care provider. The lie drips easily off my tongue, “Oh, a couple of weeks.” At the time, I did not actually know how long my shoulder had felt “jacked up,” but I knew it was more than 14 days. It was not until yesterday when I finally looked back through my training logs and noted that I had reduced my press weight on the right due to a “tweaky shoulder” in mid-May that my shoulder had been jacked up for about six weeks. If you are a climber, kayaker, any kind of athlete, you’ve had more “tweaks” over the years than you have had injury free seasons, and, although the first rule of training is “don’t get injured,” we all get injured, despite our best intentions.

As usual, I was more concerned with losing strength than healing a tweak and for six weeks I trained and climbed through the injury, albeit using much less weight for strength training but continuing to climb three times a week. Of course, what works when you are 28, works much less well when you are 59, and last week I finally took myself off to get my shoulder worked on, and heeded my providers advice to “not train until we get the mobility back.” So easy to say, so hard to do. Ringing through my head are the results of this study, which showed that older adults on bed rest lost near 10% of their leg strength over 10 days. I can’t afford that, at my age, I don’t have enough years left in me to rebuild.

We climbed on Wednesday, a day before the rains were forecast, and, for the first time, I could not climb without pain indicating that my minor tweak had, rather than healing, got a whole lot worse. For someone who believes in taking the long view towards training, I sure can get obsessed with the short view. Of course, training with injury is possible, just not the way I was training. Lots of studies have shown that continued to train the unaffected limb provides some strength stimulus to the affected limb, and, of course, as Dan John says “the body is one piece.”