Taking care of the body

[mad_m]

Hello fellow Bodies in Motion! Wondering about your stories of healing and recovery. I'm on the road back from a long layoff from running related to overtraining and muscle imbalance, and a major rock fall last September. Without getting into the details of the problems (long, boring, trust me), I finally owned that I'm getting older and simply taking a few months off with stretching just won't cut it anymore. That was a long road of getting past depression of not being able to move the way I wanted, at the speed and with the power I used to.

I hate it when I get the advice from medical professionals or massage therapists to not run, not push it, perhaps take it easier - I found the right mix of body work with an acupuncturist. After a few months of work with her, and on my own (stretching, rolling muscles, and pushing tennis balls into my trigger points at home), I'm now able to do some walk-running, body weight exercises, and the occasional short dyno at the rock gym. I also got outside to lead a few easy sport routes over Easter weekend. I used to be too proud to mix running into my walking, wouldn't climb routes I thought were beneath me, and didn't think strength training had a place in improving my climbing (totally bought into "if you want to climb, then climb!") In short, I was holding myself back with standards that my injured self couldn't meet, standards that were arbitrarily set. After letting them slack a bit, I realized how much I really can do after all, and that I'm on the road back to where I want to be.

What are your stories of breaking and rebuilding? What personal myths did you need to overcome?

Comments

[snippy]

Learning that adequate recovery time is the key to resilience. I spent most of my life thinking it was normal to be exhausted all the time, so long as I was moving fast and doing all the things. Only in the last few years I have been forced to rest after multiple surgeries and an asthma attack (put on forced bed rest by doctors), and discovered that there's no such thing as pushing though for me. I have to rest enough to recover; I actually have more capacity to breathe and walk at my normal speed after a week of walking slow and a day or two of rest than if I keep pushing myself every day to make progress.

[ivy]

Yes, this is what I'm working on at the moment too. I seem to need two or three times the recovery time that most other athletes who do what I do need. So they can Crossfit five days a week and build strength. I just get less effective, and if I push it enough, injured. I do better if I mix it up -- one day biking, one day rock climbing, one day Crossfit... but even so, I won't get the peak performance from any of those that I would if I did a week of sitting around and then did the thing. So at the moment, I'm trying to find the right balance between training hard and training stupidly such that I don't see the gains because I'm never letting my body heal.

[snippy]

It's been a hard lesson to learn--and all the harder because the standard advice permeates the communities and the atmosphere. But six months of only exercising once a week gets me further than six months of doing what "everybody says" is the best way to build muscle and stamina.

I've always said I'm a slow healer, slow but thorough. Recovery from illnesses and surgeries takes me a lot longer than other people. But I heal all the way if I let myself heal at my natural pace. Paying attention to something as simple as how it feels to walk a little slower instead of as fast as I want on any particular day makes a difference.